Dressed in traditional tribal attire, this woman is sitting outside her house taking in the sun and watching children play. Even though her age has taken a toll on her hearing ability, her smile is forever young :)
Published May 19, 2013, last updated on October 5, 2017 under Voices of DGHI
By Suhani Jalota
We parked outside a large brick house with 2 cows in a shed in the front when we reached one of the hamlets of Shedashi village (Thakurwadi). Three people welcomed us, the woman, was the village head, one of the men was her husband and the other an active member of the village committee. They guided us inside the house after we removed our sandals. They made us women sit on the chairs while the men sat on the floor. I was happy to find that gender differences, if at all in the house, were favorable to the females! This fact was reaffirmed in our talks when the village head said that people in the village including her now prefer to have daughters over sons as daughters are more loving and they study more seriously, while boys tend to consume alcohol and do drugs. Wow!
I started to ask them questions about the usage of toilets. Fortunately, they could all understand my Hindi and I could grasp a little bit of their Marathi language. The two women with me would translate anything I didn’t understand. Many of the things the people of the village said amazed and shocked me, like when I asked them if they think that openly defecating would make them more susceptible to mosquitoes and cause malaria, they responded by saying, “See, if we don’t have toilets, we don’t collect water there, and so mosquitoes are not attracted there, so no malaria!” Makes a lot of sense when they they say it like that! I was surprised to know that malarial cases in the area were actually very low, according to them. They said that they feel uncomfortable using a toilet in the same way I would to defecate in the open.
"When there is so much space to do it outside, why would we use the toilet?"
"We have always done it in the open and find it most convenient to do so." They even joked about how even if they had a fully functional toilet they would not be able to use it.
But I was not going to let this topic go, so I encouraged them to tell me more about toilets as some of the houses did have them. Why did those houses have toilets in the first place? They said the government gave them money to build it, but it wasn’t enough for a toilet so they usually used it to build bigger houses.
“The government thinks toilet is a need, but it is actually their need, not ours. So why should we build or use the toilet?” Perplexed, I asked about their children who go out of the village for education because the only school in the village is through 4th grade. I was glad to know that when their children came back educated from the cities, even for vacation, they asked for toilets. They refused to openly defecate, so many houses constructed toilets for this purpose. Yet, the adults who had grown up in the village never used the toilet.
I wanted to figure out how to make them aware of the benefits of using a toilet. Having gone there expecting to hear about the high rates of diarrhea, malaria and other water-borne diseases and then convincing them that open defecation was the root cause, I was simply stunned at listening to counter arguments and jokes about how they perceive toilets to be unnecessary.
