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A Toilet in Every Home
In 2010, I found myself working in Noida, India – a modern pop-up city on the outskirts of Delhi.
Narendra Modi, a lifelong political operative, was angling to become the 14th prime minister of India. One of the more unusual planks of his platform was the aspiration to put a toilet in every home. (At the time, about half the homes in India didn’t have indoor toilets, and those that did were predominantly in cities or their surrounding sprawl.)
Who wouldn’t want to have a toilet?
It turns out that approximately 500 million of the electorate did not.
Odd, that. Anyone who’s ever visited an outhouse at summer camp or a port-o-potty at a music fest would most certainly choose a private and sanitary toilet over an outdoor alternative. So one would think.
But while Modi’s moonshot made sense to me, it didn’t to a half billion people.
I was surprised at the quiet skepticism expressed over Modi’s gambit. In conversations with taxi drivers, restaurant servers, and hotel staff, I learned that many rural Indians questioned why anyone would want to do that thing indoors … where one eats and sleeps … where the children play … where one meditates and prays. Their position was that there were indoor things and outdoor things. That thing was definitely an outdoor thing.
I concluded: not everyone wanted to have a toilet.
* * *
My work took me from India to Prague – where coincidentally 99% of homes had indoor toilets.
Over the ensuing months, I got to know my workmates well. Most of them were in their late 20s and early 30s with their parents being in their late 50s and early 60s.
Living and operating out of a hotel room for the better part of a year, my colleagues sometimes invited me to their homes on the weekends to relieve my monotony. Sunday dinners often included extended family thus gave me access to people who had begun their adult lives under communist rule and were completing them under liberty. (Remember: the Czech Republic broke away in 1989.)
Having grown up the grandson of people who had fled the grip of tyranny in Poland and Ukraine in the 1910s and ’20s, I relished those weekends … I was eager to learn what their early lives had been like under Gustáv Husák, the long-time First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It had to have been brutal … suffocating. So one would think.
This cadre of middle-aged, post-break-up Czechs, however, didn’t agree. They pined for a less frenetic, less complicated life. Things like career management, social mobility, and home ownership were overwhelming to them. Late in the evenings, encouraged by Karlsbader Becherbitter – a preferred digestif – and the many beers before it, they’d confided in me that the new way wasn’t as comfortable as the old way. And if given the chance to turn back the hands of time, they might.
I concluded: not everyone wants to have liberty.
* * *
This week, in reaction to the terrorist incursion into Israel, former ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley told CNN’s Jack Tapper, “… there are so many of these people who want to be free from this terrorist rule, they want to be free from all of that …”
(She isn’t unique in using this assertion to justify her position. Bush the senior drew the same connection. Clinton said something similar. W used it. And had I been paying attention, I’d probably have found Obama standing on similar ground. It’s the halcyon call of all Western elites and parties.)
For decades, the West has justified its interventions in foreign affairs using precisely this reasoning: all people want to be able to speak freely, to pursue any vocation, to worship anything or nothing at all, to assemble, to assemble and complain while assembled, to expect decorum and fairness from police and justices, and to suffer no punishment greater than the gravity of the infraction, e.g., no getting tossed off the roof of a building for holding hands with another man at a theater. So one would think.
But not everyone wants a toilet in his home.
Published in Foreign Policy
If it was done indoors the same as outdoors, that would be a more valid point. But it wasn’t.
It would be like arguing that bathing/showering should be done outdoors, lest water get everywhere in the house. But there’s a tub, or something, so water DOESN’T get everywhere.
I agree with you. But this was their “push back.” This was their reasoning.
The startling thing to me was my discovery of: things that seemed clear-cut and obvious to me weren’t for that rural Indian who — in 2013 — demurred at the offer of an indoor toilet.
Chinese unicorns, robots and Angels don’t defecate and I’ve always found that connection fascinating. Pagan gods do defecate. Not particularly relevant to the post but I thought I’d mention it.
This is a wonderful heartwarming post, full of respect and friendship.
But I agree completely George W. Bush:
I strongly recommend people read the entire speech.
I am blessed to have a husband and three children, two sons-in-law, and two grandchildren. What I know from these people who bless my life is that change is good, even and especially change I never thought I wanted or needed. Each of them, in one way or another, has pushed me to try new things.
The great tragedy of our human condition is that we are very adaptable. That’s a good way to be when facing a stint in the hospital or a new job.
But it also holds us back from enjoying and making the most of our life.
Fun fact, Noida is actually an acronym for “New Okhla Industrial Development Authority”. You know a city is master planned, when it goes by an acronym.
It took a while to become obvious here, too.
Are unicorns, robots, and angels thought to EAT anything? Maybe that’s why. Nothing in, nothing out. Pagan gods do eat, what with sacrifices and all.
I’m glad you took my essay in the spirit I intended: I meant for it to be respectful and heartfelt.
I’ve personally benefited from the determination and courage of my grandparents to be free. So did my aunts, uncles, and cousins. To wit: 2 of their grandchildren went to Harvard only 35 years after they disembarked at Ellis Island. (I wasn’t one of them!) One of their kids joined the fledgling US Air Force and went on to become a senior officer. Their progeny became and have become business owners, business people, doctors, and even distinguished musicians. The key was –of course — they were liberated. But my paternal grandfather never saw it … unable to grasp English, he was relegated to menial work in the rail yard. Not quite Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” he must have second-guessed himself a bundle of times.
I cried when I saw Iraqis streaming out of polling station pointing their ink-stained fingers to Heaven; I was grateful for America’s role in helping make it happen.
Back to those post-communist Czechs: they talked about the days following independence … they told me they danced in the streets; they held great hope. Yet after slogging through their new lives for decades, they sadly concluded their wiring precluded jubilant embrace of freedom.
Hmm, if they were only “liberated” from communism to socialism, I can understand the lack of enthusiasm.
I am loath to say anything nice about Communism or Mao. But the Truth is the ultimate good. Even Chinese who hate Mao and Communism respect that the old school Mao-style Communism could motivate people and bureaucrats to act decently for the greater good. This was in between slaughtering religious minorities of course but it still has a powerful effect on the Chinese mind.
Going from a moving ideology to nothing is tough.
If someone taught them that liberty was nothing, THAT was the mistake.
Chinese unicorns don’t need to eat unless they breed. Arguably, robots eat and defecate batteries. I do not wish to hijack this thread. I just have diverse interests.
A few years ago I watched a documentary about a guy who was either born in a North Korean prison camp or who grew up there after his parents were arrested when he was a little kid. This guy escaped to China, then made it into South Korea. After living in SK for a year or two he thought it was a mixed bag. On the good side, everyone had plenty to eat, where in the prison camp, everyone was almost starving. Also, he enjoyed the lack of beatings. He was partially crippled due to the beatings from the NK prison guards.
But overall, he seemed to miss the prison lifestyle. He grew up never having to make any decisions. The guards told everyone what to do. As an adult in SK, he is expected to get a job, make his own way in life, and make a hundred decisions a week. Yes, being a prisoner meant being hungry and beaten, but the freedom from the responsibility of making choices was apparently kind of a good trade-off this guy reckoned.
I don’t say that I thus concluded that most people would rather be an abused prisoner than be free, but there are such people. For a lot of people globally, when they say they want freedom, they don’t mean the type of individual freedom that we enjoy. They just want the “freedom” to be ruled over by a strongman from their own tribe, rather than by a strongman of foreign origin.
It seems at least possible that the main reason was because that’s all he knew when growing up.
And Sinop is, similarly but in Portuguese, an acronym for a made-from-scratch settlement in Amazonia. I’ve never been to it but I am confident that it fully meets Western-Hemisphere standards for indoor plumbing.
Not that I’d ever work for a politician in India but if I did, I’d suggest a slightly different slogan: A bathroom in every house and a toilet in every bathroom. A little complicated but maybe in a vastly multilingual society (which India is and Brazil is not), you need to spell these things out.
Yes, and in the Philippines I saw many “bathrooms” with just a hole in the floor.
This shows once again the wisdom of the founding fathers who warned against foreign entanglements.
Great post! Thanks.
I traveled to India for work for 30 years – lot of places in India have the same thing. (Also, not everyplace has TP )
I have traveled fairly extensively in countries to the south of us and in parts of southwest Asia, including Afghanistan. I always found the presence or absence of toilets and their condition to be an interesting sidelight. For instance, in a small village in southern Mexico that I visted several times they had toilet without any attached plumbing. When you went into it you took a bucket of water with you. When finished you simply emptied the bucket into the toilet, in essence, flushing the waste away. It ran into the Gulf of Tehuantepec in which I swam every day.
In another city, I think it was Guadalajara, I went into a bathroom in a restaurant feeling a bit more than a little quesy. When I had finished I realized that there was no toilet paper, but lots of finger painting on the surrounding walls. I was fortunate in having something to substitute for the purpose, and thereafter never went into a toilet unprepared.
On an expedition into Nuristan in 1971 we had to trek about 40 miles to the base of our objective. On that trip it was necessary to be the first one up since there was rarely more than on flat spot on which to make ones morning toilet. Those who followed had a far less pristine spot. When close to villages that hadn’t at that time been exposed to many western travelers it was often necessary to simply tolerate a number of villagers looking on while you did what you had to do.
I suppose the real definition of civilization and culture has alot more to do with how we handle these normal human processes than our art and technology.
China, The People’s Republic of, has been modernizing rapidly but it wasn’t many years ago that I observed Chinese toddlers dressed in crotchless pants so they could go when and where they needed to go. It wasn’t uncommon to see them taking care of business, with Mom’s approval and assistance, on a city sidewalk. And don’t assume they felt any need to pick up and carry it off.
Toilets in homes!? I can’t claim to have been in many except for those being used as hostels and restaurants for foreign tourists. There might be a shared pisser on the first floor of a small apartment block, designed so it can drain out into the ditch in front of the building. Other needs required a trip down the block to the neighborhood public facility.
No doubt the Chinese claim to have invented major advances in sanitation during their 5000 years of global cultural domination. Remember that scene in which the little ‘Last Emperor’ crapped in a bowl so his highly qualified doctors and nutritionists could examine it to monitor the royal’s health? I suppose such sophisticated capabilities may have naturally deteriorated during the hard times of Western imperialism, Civil War, WW2, and the Communist era. But the PRC may be experiencing a sort of toilet sanitation renaissance as millions of Chinese students return properly educated and experienced from years abroad at schools in Europe and America.
Russia still has about 30% of the population going to the little wooden shacks out back (which tells how well 70 years of communism provided for the people there). There might be an inverse relationship between the percentage of homes with Siberian S-houses and the degree of liberty the people enjoy.
Freedom means different things to different people. In the early days of the United States, New Englanders wanted the freedom to outlaw religions they didn’t like. Southerners wanted the freedom to keep slaves and do with them as they liked. People in the western territories wanted freedom from government laws and taxes.
I’m quite sure Hamas wants the freedom to murder Jews.
Everyone wants freedom, but we have to know what they mean by that before we endorse it.
Off-topic, but I hope they’re not finished. From just the information here, and assuming the husbands/sons-in-law are not brothers, that would represent a 67% decline in population.
I remember reading about how when the first “factory cities” – Maquiladoras – were set up in Mexico, the worker housing had indoor plumbing but the Mexican workers had no idea how to use them. The toilets wound up needing a lot of maintenance because the workers would leave the “cleaning-up” rocks in them.
At the risk of derailing the excellent primary point of the post, several years ago my wife accompanied our church youth on a work project trip into a section of the United States in which houses with satellite television receivers outnumbered houses with indoor plumbing.
Well sure, satellite receivers don’t require connection to pressurized water supplies etc.
My son and I went on a mission trip to Appalachia when he was in 8th grade. We saw generational poverty the likes of which I could have never imagined exited in the United States. And to your word — some of the rooftops had TV satellites accompanied, once in a while, by a hole in the roof nearly the diameter of the dish.
We weren’t there to fix roofs or reposition antennae, rather to build a small church. But because I had been a roofer as a young man, I knocked on a few doors to see if they wanted me to patch the roof. They demurred. To this day, I don’t know why.
Pride. I kinda respect them for refusing a handout. That is I respect them if they also refuse government aid. Do you know if the hole in roof people refused aid.
Dunno. Too long ago to remember.