What we talk about when we talk about floating toilets in Cambodia
The backstory of HandyPod floating toilets for Cambodian Floating Schools crowdfunding campaign that ended on September 29th, 2015
“Was there a moment when it all just clicked, and you decided to invent a floating toilet? Like, you saw a girl swimming in the water and she was coughing violently, something like that?”
“No. That’s too romantic…You see young kids, happy, splashing in the water. Then, you need to use the bathroom and you realize it’s all going straight into the water. There was a moment, a realization at a floating village that the biological treatment boxes I had built on land could be used in water if they could only float.”
Bopha wakes with the sun breaking through the curtain. She feels the current under her feet this morning. Her younger brother Serywath, and their dog Happy, asleep. Mom (Siya) must be out at the doctor, her routine lately. Bopha steps outside. Tonle Sap Lake is a million diamonds. She looks around — no one. She’s in a rush to go, before anyone wakes up.
The Tonle Sap is the most complex hydro-ecological system in the world. On the walls of the Angkor Wat temples, embedded carvings depict the Tonle Sap brimming with fish, mortals walking on water like Jesus. Today, people are just people. Per year, according to the government, the Tonle Sap produces 400,000 tonnes of freshwater fish. It also still produces big fish species, like the Mekong giant barb, but they tend to be of smaller size than before due to the fishing pressure. Each November, the Tonle Sap and the Mekong Rivers dance with each other: the Tonle Sap, having acted as a reservoir for the overflow of the Mekong during the monsoon, reverses to let water back into the Mekong as water levels begin to fall — hence the annual Water Festival to celebrate the change in flow and the multitude of fish it flushes from the lake. Phnom Penh is the site where the two giant rivers intersect as Cambodia becomes the water drain of Southeast Asia, conveying water from an enormous watershed into the South China Sea.
With their friends and classmates, Bopha and Serywath ferry to their anchored floating school. Six to a boat, 460 children attend the school, out of the 1,600 people who live in Mechrey, their floating village. Class starts at eight am, ends at four pm — 13 classrooms in all, 35 students to each. The school feels like it is getting smaller because enrollment is getting bigger. Bopha is seated in her classroom, looking out to see Serywath is seated in his, her habit. The ruler is slapped three times, class begins.
Where floating communities reside on the Tonle Sap is where the Tonle Sap is a pathogen soup of sewage-contaminated water. For as long as the floating communities have been on the Tonle Sap, the people have gone into the water. Land sanitation systems, such as pit latrines, only work on land.
One out of seven child deaths is from diarrhea caused by waterborne pathogenic diseases. The WTO and Wetlands Work! want to change that. This is not the World Trade Organization, this is the World Toilet Organization.
Wetlands Work! and the WTO want to popularize the HandyPod.
Bopha is zoning out. It’s because multiplication, which used to interest her, doesn’t any more. It’s because she doesn’t want to listen to her teacher, who just scolded her for being unfocused, daydreaming of boys. Her back is knotting, her stomach cramping. She doesn’t want to get up. Her classmates will see. Kong, who’s hunting for every opportunity to embarrass her, will see.
There is hardly any privacy in floating communities. The whole family lives in a single room dwelling. Menstruation is an embarrassment, mother nature’s reminder of weakness. In floating communities, the science of the human body is thought of differently. When you get sick, it’s not simply biology, it’s a karmic punishment by the spirits. You have done something to upset and summon them. Girls bear more than their fair share of this burden.
Bopha & Serywath’s father, Panhit, is a fisherman. When he is home, the small flooding house is filled with jokes and stories. He talks about how they chased an otter that tore their nets, his neighbor who was supposed to keep watch but drank too much rice wine and fell off the boat. The funny stories are becoming fewer. Work is getting harder because there are fewer fish. The kids get sick and the money that was supposed to go to getting a bigger boat goes to the doctor’s bills. Their mother Siya stays at home. Their parents yell at each other now. Their mother cries, so they cry too.
The HandyPod is a sanitation system designed specifically for floating communities by the Wetlands Work! team. How it works: when one goes into the ordinary-looking porcelain squat toilet pan, the feces flush into a container that acts as an anaerobic digestor, and then after a while with more flushes, the wastewater moves into a floating Pod with aquatic plants. These aquatic plants host root-bound microorganisms. The waste continues to be broken down, eliminating 99.999% of E. Coli and the cleaned up water is slowly released into the lake through pin-holes. The system self-cleans, with no chemical and no plumbing required. But the cost of the materials and the transport adds up: the HandyPod costs $92 for families.
“The tide is high but I’m holding on
I’m gonna be your number one
I’m not the kind of girl who gives up just like that
Oh, nooooooooo”
Siya sits at today’s event “Community Led Total Sanitation.” Phanna, the community liaison for the past four years, unveils the HandyPod. Collaboratively, Phanna deconstructs the total pricing into its components, labor and transportation costs. The group comes to agreement that all these elements together will cost $240. They see the official price of $92. Only $92?! Much less than $240 but — it is still a lot of money for people here, even though the remote floating communities tend to pay higher prices than land communities for almost everything except fish. The community members begin to understand the value of the HandyPod.
But with all the bills that need to be paid, the fishing equipment to be purchased, the house roof to be fixed, how to dedicate such a significant sum — $92 — for a toilet? Going over the side of the house costs exactly $0, after all. Like anyone, we’re self-interested — what’s in it for me? Phanna knows the trick to use: math. He poses a question to the mothers attending the event. “When a child gets sick, how much do the medicines cost? How much do you pay the doctor? The boatman to take you to the closest land village? The tuktuk driver to drive you to the clinic?” A trip to the local doctor in Siem Reap can cost up to $150, as almost the whole family goes into the city for as long as a week. The more pathogenic the water that the kids play in around the house, the higher the likelihood of doctor visits becoming a recurring cost. With every HandyPod installed, the pathogen soup that is the water in floating communities will become less so. More is less.
Siya surveys the vendors set up in front of the floating school selling the HandyPod. The HandyPod is nice, its latrine pan made of ceramic. Her family will be making a big contribution to community health and gain convenience, too. She won’t have to worry about her daughter taking the boat alone into the flooded forest for privacy. But paying back a loan of eight dollars every month for a year to her community savings and loan group will be a challenge. Is it worth it to her, to her children, and her community? She decides she must make the commitment and asks the vendor to help install a HandyPod at her house.
The HandyPod may become a status symbol. It’s a significant investment. It looks like a modern toilet from the city, with a clean and shiny porcelain pan. You no longer have to go into a bucket, or from the side of the house next to your neighbor at night, or out on a boat alone. Everyone craves status. When the school HandyPod becomes introduced to the community schools, hundreds of students will go home expounding the convenience of HandyPods. Having kids use HandyPod toilets in school creates a critical shift in the mentality of the community, an example of “social marketing”.
The rain comes down, hard — the lake gets bigger — everyone moves toward the calmer waters in the floodplain. The family leases a motor to take their floating home toward safety. Each lease of the motor is ten dollars. This is the third time this year already. Every year, the rising and falling Lake makes them move at least ten times. Between moving a home and buying a HandyPod for home sanitation, the expenses are hard to meet for Panhit & Siya. Nevertheless, they know there is no long-term benefit in short-term living choices.
Climate change is the elephant in the sky. From Cambodia to California, everyone is feeling it. Ecological panic, displacement, migrations, movement — the story of human civilization. As floods and the rising sea level consume the shores — the coastal and rural flight, are forming megacities — and with that, peri-urbanization of informal communities skirting the megacities of the world. Wetlands Work! sees the HandyPod as a model for these peri-urbanized areas. Floating communities will only get bigger. Migrants will move to un-owned peri-urban space such as waterways. We are becoming the floating Mad Max.
Bopha sneaks outside. Everyone is asleep. Happy, their dog, is asleep. She sits, feet dangling over the water. She hears the frogs, the crickets. She looks at the stars, the new surrounds. She takes a breath.
“Denying science imperils the future by summoning the ghosts of the past.”
$8,000 is the tipping point goal for the HandyPod. The ultimate goal is $20,000 so HandyPods can be installed at schools in Cambodia and in Bangladesh. At the time of publication, $5,591 (Update 9/29: $16,280) had been pledged. The HandyPod school crowdfunding campaign ended on September 29th, 2015 but feel free to follow up with Wetlands Work! here. Donations are tax-exempt.
Click here to donate: https://startsomegood.com/Venture/world_toilet_organization/Campaigns/Show/first_floating_toilets_for_floating_schools
(Special thanks to Irina Chakraborty, Taber Hand, Hồn Du Mục, Michael Nguyen, Grace Phuong Thao Tran, Bill George, Nathan Beyerlein & Jason Nguyen)
Published in The Thirsty: Life in Southeast Asia
