Ghana Day 14, 032612 Bucket showers and Pit Toilets

Day 14 032612 Bucket Showers and Pit Toilets

I'm still processing these two issues that more generally, relate to sanitation in Ghana. There are gradations of Westernized sanitation (flush toilets and showers), that initially seemed random until viewed as a modernization from the basics, bucket showers and pit toilets.

First, a word about sanitation here. The “sewers” are foot wide by foot deep troughs that run through the streets of Accra and cities, and that also weave their way into the residential neighborhoods. For the most part, these do their job, separating waste from everything else. Where they run into problems is in rare situations of flooding, where this stuff rises up and mixes with heavy rains to blanket an area in waste. Think Hurricane Katrina and the photos of contaminated water running through neighborhoods. Again, this is not usually a problem. We did see such flooding occurring in a TV news report in a large city while we were here. 12 died of cholera over last weekend in that mess. While that made the evening news, a secondary factor is that people here do not rush to a doctor or clinic when they are ill, in this case for antibiotics, so often conditions go untreated until they have become critical and life threatening. This is also a city where over a million people are jam packed.

Let's ease into this topic with the basic form of cleansing here, the bucket shower. Basically, one fills a 4 or 5 gallon bucket with water, from whatever source one has handy, and carries it to a space where you wet and soap and wash with pailfuls of water from the bucket. This couple of gallons becomes your shower allotment, so you learn quickly to allocate it wisely for adequate rinsing. The larger, “source” bucket is usually accompanied by a smaller pile for self-drenching, similar to one used on the beach as sand toys.

I mentioned earlier that water comes from various sources. The water available is for washing and showering, but not recommended for drinking as it sometimes contains bacteria and other pond water organisms that are not compatible with vibrant health. Sometimes, as was the case at our orphanage, we had to shlep (called “fetching”) buckets of water from a few hundred yards away, at a neighbors who had a water pipe outside their house. Some homes have outside “pipes” or wells. One other volunteer group had to carry their water almost a mile from an outlet near a local stream. Their trip included wading through a small swamp. Of course, many homes have internal plumbing.

Bucket showers can be done out in the open. Ghanaians are pretty comfortable with their bodies and things like showering or eliminating are just an open part of life in a way that we Westerners are not quite as easy going with. Many showers are done in an outside enclosure, or curtained area for privacy. Remember that it is nearly always 85 degrees here and rarely rains. One place that we visited had a small outbuilding that was like a changing room with a floor drain for bucket showers. It was conveniently located a few steps from the water pipe, making for a relatively easy process.

Many buildings and hostels have regular plumbing and showers, but most just offer cold water, although some of the plumbing fixtures were borrowed from Western designs, with a cold and (inoperative) hot faucet. The majority of these in-building showers were small rooms with floor drains and a wall water outlet (rather than a tub or stall shower that we might see in the States). A cold water shower on a hot day isn't really that bad. The water is closer to luke-warm, and the second that you stop showering, you begin sweating again.

Luxury hotels, of course, let everyone pretend that they are somewhere else, and mimic the hot/cold showers back home. We stayed at a magnificent bed and breakfast in Kumasi that had hot and cold water, a tub, air conditioning. It was owned by a Western couple who knew of such things.

Just as there are various comfort levels of showering, the toilets also come in various upgrades. As I said earlier, there are these sort of waste trenches that run everywhere. In the neighborhoods where we were volunteering, which was quite poor, it was pretty common for people to stop and pee when the mood struck them. This was done equally by boys and girls, men and women. Just a kind of matter-of-fact life moment that didn't phase anyone.

The basic toilet is a pit toilet, which is just a hole in the ground. Most are in some sort of outhouse enclosure, both to keep in odor and privacy, and to keep out the ever-present wandering animals, mostly goats. Such a toilet has a chair height wooden platform with a toilet-seat-shaped opening over the pit which is about 4 or 5 feet deep. I understand that these are pumped or cleaned in some way every year or so, and that paper waste is unwelcome. For this reason, there is a small box near the seat for any paper used. I am told that this is occasionally burned, when the container fills up.

Toilet paper is a decidedly foreign idea. There are vendors everywhere selling toilet paper in the marketplace. I think it is something new that is being marketed here. It is best to bring your own toilet paper since you never know where you might end up. In some of the poorer areas, I noticed that this paper waste receptacle included pieces of corrugated cardboard, newspaper, recycled flyers and torn pages from paperbacks, presumably the poorer written sections.

With indoor plumbing, flush toilets are pretty common, but the side bucket for paper (sometimes a waste basket next to the toilet) still prevails. I don't know enough about the plumbing and sewage systems to know if paper is a toilet clogging issue, but most places that we visited hadn't adapted to both flush toilets and a TP holder. The only advice that I can offer is, if you are accustomed to TP, best to bring your own. The local tribal customs reserve the left hand for this activity.

We visited a national park that had a modern restroom facility, down to the infrared, self-flushing toilets. One person in our party mentioned that a large school group, who was making a pit stop before their hike, had filled the bathroom, but that no one had thought to close the door of their stall. People are just more comfortable here, doing what we all do.