Thursday 25.11 Sanitation workshop

Hi,

As a pretask, we were told to watch a video from YouTube called ”Living from a bucket”. The film told about a voluntary group in a slum called Kibera, which is situated in Kenya. The group was called "Hands of love", what a great name! A group of young boys were cleaning up in the slum every Saturday to improve the standard of living in their neighbourhood. In Kibera, inadequate sanitation is a major problem, and sometimes people just use plastic bags and throw them somewhere after use, this is called ”flying toilets”. It really touched me on te video that young peolple want to make a difference to improve everybody’s lives.

On Thursday’s workshop, we had four different tasks related to sanitation. I was in group 1. In the beginning of the workshop, we had a sort of ”brainstorming”, and everybody had to discuss with other people to get solutions for all the four tasks. After brainstorming, the solutions were written to post-it notes and put on the wall. Every group had to organize the post-it notes and come up with a solution to the problem. I think this brainstorming was great, because after that the solution was kind of ready. Everybody had great ideas and quite many had similar ideas concerning our problem. Our problem in group 1 was to plan sustainable sanitation for Kibera. UN gives 600,000 dollars to improving living conditions on the area. Our plan was following:

1)      Inform locals on the importance on hygiene and proper sanitation -> The change has to happen from the people. You can’t go and say ”This is bad for you”, you have to proof your ideas so that the change is permanent.

2)      Set up a campaign with the help of NGO’s to spread information and to get the locals involved in cleaning their environment. If all the waste was even dumped to the same place, the living conditions would be much better.

3)      Technical solution is dry toilets, because they are easy to build and because there is no water piping in the slum. Some of the slum housing settlements are not legal so permanent water piping and normal toilets are not an option everywhere.

I think the plan was quite easy to make because the solution was already on the post-it notes. Therefore we didn’t have to think everything by ourselves and start from scratch. The brainstorming part took quite along time but I think it was more useful than just sitting with the group, because now we had everybody’s ideas and not just the group’s. Sometimes it was hard to have good ideas in the brainstorming session but in the end there were quite similar answers, because we had to talk to as many peolple as we could. I think the workshop was fun and useful.