My Comment : I Love The Public Toilets In Paris And Dream That There Will be Functioning Loos Like This All Over The World Very Soon. The subcontinent has ancient civilizations which had created a very efficient sewer system some 3000 years ago. You can witness this in the ruins of Mohen-joDaro.
Andrea Bruce captured the hardships and hazards of living with open defecation, which affects nearly one billion people.
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By James Estrin
After
years covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Andrea Bruce was asked by
National Geographic in 2016 to undertake one of the most difficult
assignments of her career.
The subject? Open defecation.
“It
almost seemed so ridiculous that I had to do it,” Ms. Bruce said. “But
once you start researching you realize that it’s among the most
important issues today, affecting nearly a billion people. If you don’t
have proper sanitation, you don’t have clean drinking water, and then
you don’t have a healthy population.”
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Ms.
Bruce said her challenge was to take a complex story that was difficult
“to make visual” and produce images that would engage and educate her
audience. The photos are on display this week at the Visa Pour l’Image
photography festival in Perpignan, France.
Toilets
that safely dispose of waste save lives because human feces spread
diseases like cholera, diarrhea, typhoid and hepatitis. But Ms. Bruce
discovered in her research that 950 million people around the world —
with more than half of those in India alone — routinely relieve
themselves outside. Around 60 percent of the global population either
have no toilet at home or one that doesn’t safely dispose of human
waste, according to the United Nations, while 1.8 billion people drink
water from contaminated sources.
Children are especially vulnerable to diarrhea caused by poor sanitary conditions. It is, along with the lack of clean water, the leading cause of death for those under 5 years old worldwide. In India, diarrhea kills more than 100,000 children a year.
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Ms.
Bruce photographed in Haiti, India and Vietnam, countries that have had
varying degrees of success in providing safe indoor toilets for their
citizens. The Vietnamese government made providing indoor toilets in
public schools and houses a priority and has largely succeeded, Ms.
Bruce said. Schoolchildren were educated on using toilets and washing
hands and were encouraged to spread the practice to their families. In
most communities she visited, most homes had indoor toilets and
practiced “healthy sanitation,” she said.
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Haiti,
beset by natural disasters, a lack of infrastructure and poor
sanitation, has had a more difficult path. When Hurricane Matthew hit
Haiti, Ms. Bruce covered it as spot news for the National Geographic’s
website, including documenting its effect on sanitation and the
availability of indoor toilets for her project.
She
also photographed the people she sees as the “unsung heroes of
sanitation in Haiti,” the “bayakou” who often strip down and climb into
pit latrines to clean them out. By hand.
“They
only work at night because people throw rocks at them, and even their
family members often don’t know what they do,” she said. “They’re like
masked superheroes.”
India’s Prime
Minister Narendra Modi campaigned on ending the unsanitary practice and
set a deadline for Gandhi’s 150th birthday in October of next year. He
has set aside more than $40 billion to build latrines and toilets and
change public behavior. But in a country the size of India, with its
large and sluggish bureaucracy, Ms. Bruce said, that ambitious target
may not be met.
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Open
defecation is particularly dangerous for women and girls who are
vulnerable to rape when they walk away from their houses to relieve
themselves in private. Ms. Bruce often photographed women going out in
the fields as a group, “because there’s safety in numbers,” she said.
Even worse, the lack of toilets in schools often leads girls to drop out
once they start menstruating because there is no privacy.
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Ms.
Bruce was a staff photographer for The Washington Post before leaving
to become a freelancer in 2009 so she could pursue long-term
international stories. She has worked extensively for The New York Times
and is a member of the photographer-owned photo agency Noor Images.
Her
subtle images stick out from the graphically dramatic, and at times
explicit, conflict photographs that are usually exhibited at the Visa
Pour l’Image festival. She was pleasantly surprised that this challenging story was chosen, she said.
“It’s not a sexy topic or as dramatic as some war zone photos, but it causes just as much death and destruction.”
James Estrin, the co-editor of Lens, joined The Times as a photographer in 1992 after years of freelancing for the newspaper and hundreds of other publications. @JamesEstrin
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