Water and sanitation in Mali is lacking...we need your help!
Hi everyone! My name is Ryan Shaw.
I’m a Peace Corps volunteer living in Mali, just a few train stops away from where Michelle was serving (and I miss having her around). Mahina is a town of 7,000 people in the middle of nowhere, and there’s a lot of work to do in the town itself, as well as in the surrounding villages. I’m a water and sanitation volunteer, so most of my projects involve either drinking water, or toilets. There are a lot of other possibilities (my first project was garden fencing for a women’s group). I’m a year into service, which is just about when you start understanding the language and having any idea what’s going on around you.
There have been highs and lows, but things are starting to happen, and I’m having a blast. As I’m sure Michelle has written, Malians are some of the warmest, most welcoming people you will ever meet, and oh how they love to laugh. I’m a good day’s travel from the internet in any direction, but when I can, I’ll try to let you know what’s going on over here in our area.
Arbreloo Latrine Project started after receiving funding from Yoga Naturals and from family and friends. We started our latrine project at the beginning of this month. The village of Sitafoula currently enrolls 159 students from 3 villages.
There are no latrine facilities nearby, and many children go into surrounding fields to relieve themselves. In fact, in this town of 700 people, only 8 households have latrines. Together, community members decided to try a new type of latrine, called the Arbreloo. This compost latrine is cheap to build (about $30 excluding locally obtained materials), long-lasting, and provides ideal soil condition for planting fruit trees. Basically, we dig a hole, put a latrine floor slab over it, do our business a few months until the hole if full, and then move the slab to a new hole to be filled. We cover the full hole with a 5inch thick layer of soil and plant a fruit tree on top.
Through a combination of limiting water in the latrine and of keeping the pit shallow, the human waste is converted into germ-free, nutrient rich compost, so that when the roots get past the 5 inches of soil, the compost is ready to feed the tree tons of nutrients. Germs are killed, fruit is grown, and everyone is happy. If these 3 schools latrines work, we hope that other people will start building them in town in their own households. Last week, we poured two of the three latrine slabs.
The villagers gathered local sand, gravel, mud bricks, and tools. I bought the cement, reinforcing bars, and plastic sheeting in Mahina and loaded up one of their donkey carts for transport to Sitafoula, 6km away.
At 9 AM Saturday morning, I found 20 men waiting under a tree with a pile of sand. I was shocked that so many people showed up to help, and even more shocked that the gravel, tools, mud bricks, and everything I had sent on the donkey cart was nowhere to be seen.
After a good scolding, things started appearing from different paths in the village. Together, we washed the gravel bucket by bucket, hand sorted to pick out rocks that were too large, and sifted the sand. We then built concrete forms by putting mud bricks in the shape we wanted and then laying large plastic sheets inside of the form. We tied together the reinforcing bars and hung them halfway down the form. By the time we had tied the reinforcing bar and mix and poured the concrete for one slab, it was 3PM. We had planned to make 2 slabs that day, so it was agreed that we would do the whole other slab Tuesday, with the promise that everything would be ready when I showed up this time. Apparently, we had learned a lot about the process, because on Tuesday morning with 6 men, it only took us 2 hours to do the other slab.
We are now curing the slabs for two weeks (i.e. throwing water all the time so the cement hydrates and gets stronger). A week from now, we’ll put these slabs on bricks and jump on the slab to make sure it won’t break when sitting over the latrine hole. If that works, we’ve planned a big day on November 12th to dig the holes for the two completed slabs, build the thatch enclosures for those two latrines, and pour the third slab.
This way, the village will be all together to see the entire process (like a cooking show, when the host already had a pie baking while he showed you how to mix the ingredients). I’m heading out there this Friday to check how the material gathering is coming along.
Keep your fingers crossed, everyone. Peace and Love, Ryan.
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