A hole in the ground, around which a wooden shed has been built and in which human beings dispose of their bodily waste, no matter how internationally accepted it is for sanitary disposal, is primitive. Even the least fastidious of us would cringe at the thought of falling into such a pit. Yet it was where nine-year-old Tenesha De Souza met her end last week. It should never have happened.
What was worse was that officialdom’s initial response to the tragic accident had the hint of the apathetic ‘this is Guyana’ tone to it, which is reprehensible. At the very least, even if he believed that the facility at Santa Rosa, Moruca could have passed the PAHO ‘internationally accepted for sanitary disposal’ test, Minister of Education Shaik Baksh ought to have been more sympathetic in his tone; his approach could have been more conciliatory, knowing that what he was responding to was anger born of deep anguish.
Minister of Amerindian Affairs Pauline Sukhai, was much more tactful in saying she “suspects that some schools in Guyana still use pit latrines because the country is still developing economically and still grappling with removing ourselves from the level of a developing country… which is a challenge to the government.” Diplomatic, but unconvincing nevertheless, since there are several things that are wrong with the situation that currently prevails at the Santa Rosa Primary School. The most glaring is the fact that the school does have flushable toilets, which are for use by only one section of its population. The issue is therefore not one of lack of development.
If a school is being rebuilt or refurbished in any area, one of the issues that must be looked at is sanitation. And if our Ministry of Education is building and rehabilitating schools in which, if the President has his way, there will be computers and internet service, then modern toilets must be part of the package. Or are we looking at selected development?
Can the Ministry of Education and/or the Regional Administration in the area say why it was decided that only teachers should have modern sanitary conveniences? And whose decision that was? And even if it were only economically feasible to set up two flushable toilets, why weren’t the pit latrines for schoolchildren, some of whom are obviously small, built in such a way that there was no chance of anyone falling into them?
A long-time resident of the community, Marco De Souza, a former parliamentarian and grandfather of the dead child told this newspaper that he feared that the area where the school’s pit latrines were had become porous, since many latrines had been dug there since he was a student, some 40-odd years ago. He posited that the situation had to have become unhealthy by now.
WASTE, an organization, which advises on development projects in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, nixes pit latrines. It says they “are rarely a good alternative, especially in places with high population density. Excreta, urine and water are mixed, the content from pit latrines can therefore seep easily into the underground water supply system.” It said the danger of leaking pit latrines was “even worse in times of rain, flooding and high groundwater level…” We need look no further back than the Great Flood of 2005 for evidence of this. Many East Coast Demerara residents would have had the experience first hand.
Anyone who has ever used an ordinary pit latrine in this country – not the ventilated versions proposed by PAHO – knows that they smell, attract flies and help breed mosquitoes among other disadvantages. But those listed above are more than enough to militate against them being not being phased out.
While it would be expensive and perhaps impossible to immediately replace all of the pit latrines in all of the schools where they are situated all at once, one would hope that Minister Baksh and his Cabinet colleagues have not already sat down and discussed sanitation in schools and decided that any school outside Georgetown, did not need modern toilets. This is one instance in which one would want to forgive the minister for talking off of the top of his head. Because one hopes that when the issue does reach the level of Cabinet, if it has not done so already, the recommendation would be that modern sanitary blocks be included in any and all forthcoming contracts to build, repair or refurbish schools wherever humanly possible.
