wanderingjefe

Deep Dive

2009-04-19T11:30:00.003-04:00

The deep dive was one-day workshop which marked the transition from the research phase to the ideation phase. The core team presented the user research report, and I gave some primers on brainstorming and prototyping methods. We then split into two groups for brainstorms on various topics and even smaller groups for building prototypes of some of the more promising ideas. We did two rounds of the brainstorm-to-prototype cycle. It was a busy, busy day. I’d never before tried to run a workshop as the only person with knowledge of the design process, and it certainly had some hiccups, but we made some good progress and it seemed that everyone had a good time. Phyrum from the WorldBank commented that he came to the meeting expecting just to listen to powerpoints all day. He was pleasantly surprised. We also went to Tonle Bassac for lunch. Kind of like the Ole Country Buffet of Khmer food, but a bit classier. . . you get to pay at the end.

the crew brainstorming

Cordell prototyping

Kim chiming in

the bamboo and plastic lined pit

a gravel filled pit

small perforated pit liner surrounded by gravel

the gravel filled trench

latrine funland, beware of the snake

Tamara, Sopheak and crew during the second round of prototyping

Hengly, advocating a design to a CLTS field rep

(unfortunately, i forget his name. . . )

the spaced ring solution. . .

standoffs reduce the number of rings required. . .

Hengly with the skyscraper solution. . .

Judy hard at work lining the pit

Mike and his moto-biked finger explaining the low-cost pit option

(a bag liner supported by bamboo poles)

the natural shelter

uncovering the temporary bamboo pit

Kimsan holding court

Tamara and her proto

Cordell describing a recent bowel movement. . .

Lyn wondering how to account for such an extreme user

Kimsan at work

a suspicious Tamara looks on at the end of the day

Catch-up

2009-04-19T10:49:00.000-04:00

Long time, no blog. My apologies. I’ll here give a recap of the last few weeks and then I’ll go into more detail in some subsequent posts. . .

The first four weeks of the project were focused on user research and resulted in the research summary document to which I’d posted a link at the end of February. Coming out of the research phase, we transitioned into trying to come up with latrine ideas that met the needs and desires of the Cambodian villagers. We started with a day-long ‘deep dive’ with the project’s core and advisory teams. We then took some of the ideas from the workshop and some supplemental ideas and spent a week and a half building scaled prototypes of existing latrine components (and a few new ones) and generating some posters which illustrated simple upgrade paths. Coming out of the early research, we weren’t highly convinced about the notion of upgradeability—whether people fully understood it or would be willing to engage in it. Upgradeability was one of the premises of the project, so it seemed worth it to doublecheck.

The field visit was only one two-hour group session in Kandal province--we were trying to be efficient—but it wasn’t highly inspiring (more detail to follow). So we decided to take the same protos to Svey Rieng for a longer, more in-depth visit to include one-on-ones with villagers and masons. That was much better. We also started to build full-scale prototypes of rings, pans and slabs and have just taken those to the field this past week. During the last few weeks, the IDE office also had a weeklong offsite to Mondulkiri (which I hear was a great time, though I couldn’t attend), I went to New Zealand for a bit of a holiday and this particular week is Khmer New Year. I think it’s now the year of the cow. Khmer New Year’s a big holiday, so the IDE office shut down except for me and Olaf (a Norwegian gent who’s leading up IDE’s water filter business). In fact, pretty much the whole city shut down because all the Khmer have gone out to the provinces to visit family and the expats have gone on holiday. I haven’t biked on such peaceful streets in a very long time.

Expertise needed. . .

2009-02-26T23:02:00.003-05:00

Any chance any of you (or your friends) can help with the following:

1. For the concrete experts. . . desperately trying to find a lightweight highly permeable concrete mixture. Have looked at pervious concretes, but am trying to get lighter. Durisol makes a cement-bonded wood fiber concrete that seems like it'd be an ideal material for us to use, but I don't know anything about it. And we don't have wood. Lots of bamboo, coconut fiber, sugar cane fiber and rice straw, though. Also curious about using rice husk ash as a partial cement replacement. If you know much about concrete, in particular lightweight, permeable, natural fiber concretes, I'd love to have an email exchange and get advice on admixtures and how to treat natural fibers to avoid rot, insect damage or concrete degradation from the sugars.

2. For the geotech experts. . . am looking to understand the loads that exist at the bottom of a latrine pit. . . any good equations or rules of thumb? Trying to understand how strong the latrine pit lining needs to be. Typical holes are 1m in diameter, 2m deep. I’m guessing the loads are worst when the soil is saturated because that’s when latrine pits are collapsing. Soil here ranges everywhere from very sandy to very clayey. Note that there should never be the case where the soil has water in it and the pit doesn't. The pit lining is permeable enough to allow water level to equilibrate.

Any help here appreciated. Please email me at jchapin -at- ideo.com. Thanks!

User Research

2009-02-23T23:59:00.004-05:00

We had our research presentation and workshop end of last week. For those interested, I put a pdf of the presentation here. It’s not fully self-explanatory, but it’ll give you a sense of what we learned and what our perspective is. I’ll post pics of the workshop in a few days.

Kandal

2009-02-23T23:30:00.000-05:00

My last two days of field work were about a week and a half ago in Kandal—a province about a half hour outside Phnom Penh. All villagers this time. Three each day. We tried to reach dry latrine, wet latrine and non-latrine households in order to better understand the motivations of each. I won’t go into it in much detail now, but did want to share more of my photos to give you a better sense of the people and the environment.

recruiting in the village houses

village kids

non user and his daughter

non user

sample latrine card sort exercise

husband and wife -- dry latrine owners

mother--ideal latrine owner

dry latrine user

her house

her toilet. . . this one was really nasty. . . lots of maggots

One interesting dietary habit we observed was the chewing of betel leaves coated with lamb fat combined with the eating of betel nuts. Done over decades, it makes ones teeth black, super black. I’m not sure how bad it is for dental hygiene, but it can’t be good. Anyhow, the lady pictured above (and below) was a chewer.

dental effects of betel leaf chewing

Svay Rieng

2009-02-17T08:18:00.000-05:00

Went into the field for the first time two weeks ago. Drove 3 hours down to Svay Rieng province. Drive was mostly uneventful, though was interrupted by a 20-minute wait to cross a big river. One would normally expect a bridge to get us across the river, but for some reason, this was all done by car ferry. The number of vendors knocking on the windows to try to sell us stuff while we waited was astounding. Sopheak bought a pommelo (huge grapefruit), which was absolutely fantastic, and Savath some corn (much less so—way overdone), but nobody ventured far enough to buy the fried crickets.

ferry loading

We arrived in Svay Rieng city (the provincial capital of Svay Rieng province), which was far from overwhelming, around noon and checked into our 5-star hotel which was more like a ½-star hotel. I definitely miss the IDEO expense budgets. . . I’ll post my user research report next weekend in which I’ll go through all the detail of what we saw, but for now. . . talked with a number of villagers (dry and wet latrine users & non-users), masons, ring producers and retailers. We had two groups of us out in the field in parallel, so we covered a lot of ground in three days—15 interviews plus transit time back and forth from Phnom Penh. . . was a bit of data overload.

Participant recruiting (normally the bane of any researcher) is remarkably simple here. We just walk around the villages until we see someone with a latrine that looks interesting then go up to their house and ask if they want to talk. Everyone spends 98% of their time outside, so they’re easy to find. And everyone has been ridiculously generous with their time, very open to talking about defecation (something with a pretty strong taboo back west) and really funny and enjoyable to interact with. Physically, the people are amazingly beautiful and have great character, especially the elderly and the children. My photography doesn’t do them great justice, but here are some of the people we met:

rice farmer

weaver

a man and his latrine

interview observers. . . don't see this normally

interviewing. . .

The interviews mostly last an hour and are almost completely out of my hands. They happen all in Khmer and for every 5 minutes of talking, I get about 30 seconds of translation. I’m not getting a lot of the nuance, but I am getting something. I’m counting on the rest of the team to bring out the nuanced insights during the discussions this week.

Some of the latrines we saw. . .

a nice one. . . pour flush

simple, dry pit latrine

trapless wet latrine

really nice, clay-walled, pseudo-flush latrine

And lastly. . .

weight set at hotel

rooster in a reed cage

CLTS

2009-02-14T05:43:00.003-05:00

End of last week I learned about Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS). It’s a movement that’s swept through the sanitation development sector in the last three or four years. It emerged in response to the realization that the decades of subsidizing latrine building was not going to solve the sanitation issue. There wasn’t enough money to build latrines for everyone, and those that were built were often left unused, locked or ended up broken. People who’d been defecating in the bush for generations weren’t going to completely change their behaviors just because there was now a latrine. In most cases, the villagers didn’t believe in the need for having a latrine. If there’s no belief, there will be no behavior change.

CLTS was pioneered in Bangladesh by Kamal Kar. If you want to see a video about it, watch this. It’s pretty interesting. In short, CLTS is a behavior change model based on generating disgust and shame. It’s about getting people to come to the realization that they are eating and drinking shit—their own shit and other people’s shit. Only later in the process is health brought up—in terms of diarrheal illness that the community experiences and health costs related to them. But primarily, it’s about eating shit. The language used is coarse--shit, shit, shit. Embarrassing people is encouraged.

Interestingly for us, CLTS is repeatedly adamant about not explicitly advocating for the construction of latrines or for specific latrine models—people are supposed to come to the realization on their own that latrines will help them stop eating shit. People are supposed to come up with their own solutions and designs to building latrines. Note, however, that CLTS is not completely consistent with this because during a CLTS event, CLTS moderators draw a simple latrine as an example (albeit late in the day during the CLTS event). And the CLTS training manual mentions that moderators can “share and explain about low and moderate cost latrine options. . . including the sources of their availability. . .” I think that the CLTS theorists just don’t want to lead the whole effort with latrine designs and latrine advocacy.

Anyhow, CLTS is the big buzz amongst the Cambodian Ministry for Rural Development and the NGOs. Though it has a few rules, CLTS is mostly open source, so each government and each NGO in each country has freedom to adapt it to more closely match their target populace and their own ideals. I’m pretty certain the Ministry for Rural Development has made a few changes to the methodology, but I’m still tracking them down. Not sure how major they are. One thing I’m fairly certain of is that the resistance of CLTS to advocate for certain latrine designs is leading to some problems in Cambodia. Amazingly enough, it turns out that if you don’t know how to properly built something, you usually do a pretty crappy job the first time. And the second time. And the third time. Ever tried to build a chair? How do you think your first one would come out?

The CLTS insistence that villagers develop their own latrine designs and constructions is, in my opinion, flawed. Most villagers are building dirt pit dry latrines. They’re cost-free (minus self-labor) but they’re far from ideal for many reasons that I’ll get to in a later post. But for now, it’s enough to know that a significant number of the dry pits built as a result of CLTS efforts have been collapsing due to soil instability during the wet season. The villagers affected are left without proper sanitation for the rest of that wet season and have to redig a new pit the following year. Often, the pit isn’t redug and the villagers return to open defecation. When it is redug, it often collapses again the next wet season. It’s not a sustainable sanitation approach here in Cambodia. I’m not sure how to marry the IDE technology solutions with the agnosticism of CLTS, but I am sure that it needs to be done.

By wanting a $10-20 initial price-point, are we fighting the CLTS efforts? How do we say that our $10-20 latrine is the first step when CLTS is saying that a hand-made dry pit is the first step? Do we need a zero price-point (or $2-$5) design included in our material (i.e., a dry pit design with a dirt pit—maybe lined with local free bamboo—covered with a bamboo and clay slab with a thatch superstructure—cash expenditure only for nails and for a pipe for pit ventilation)?

I also wonder how this might affect the IDE marketing effort. How closely will IDE work with CLTS? Will IDE be in the villages at the same time as CLTS folks or shortly after? When will IDE share its designs and how will that fit in with the CLTS philosophy? Should IDE’s marketing efforts echo the same coarse language and push some of the same buttons as CLTS (disgust and shame)? Given our premise of an upgradeable latrine (a stair-step model, if you will), is the first big step about not eating shit?

Kampot

2009-02-14T05:35:00.000-05:00

Time for catch up. . . from two weekends ago. Took a 3-hour bus trip that turned into a 6-hour bus trip (a lot of traffic and a LOT of pee stops for the weak-sphinctered bus populace) to a town called Kampot down near the coast. Was put in the last row of the bus with 4 Cambodians who spoke a little bit of English and wanted to talk the whole way. The were pretty entertaining, especially when the old guy sitting next to me decided that he’d rather pee into a little black plastic bag than have the bus stop and pull over. I don’t think he was too successful, however, because about 30 minutes later, he had the bus stop so he could go outside. Not sure what happened to the plastic bag.

the bus stop. . . my bus is 3rd from the right

Saturday afternoon I travelled via tuktuk to two cave temples (Phnom Chhnok being much nicer than Phnom Sorsia) in which Buddhist monks had built brick temples in the 7^th century AD. They were in remarkably good condition. I had tons and tons of kids as tour guides—they all want to talk, and I probably waved and said ‘hello’ to about a hundred people as the tuktuk ambled down dirt roads out to the temples.

on the way to Phnom Chhnok

more scenery

from the hill of Phnom Sorsia

Phnom Chhnok temple

my tour guides and the temple

with my tour guides

along the river in Kampot

Sunday I was going to go up to an old abandoned French hill station (Bokor) but the road up was closed for construction and the hike up takes 6-hours and requires an overnight stay that I didn’t have time for, so I just borrowed a bike and went on a three hour bike ride in the countryside—again, a lot more hellos. . . then took a shared taxi (a toyota corolla with 5 other passengers—would have been 6 but I paid two fares so I could have the front seat to myself!!). The driver actually shared his seat with a passenger.

taxi driver talking on his cell phone with a guy sitting to his left sharing his seat. . .

But it was only a 2.5 hour drive, rather than the 6 hour drive, and for only 6 bucks more it was worth it. Was dropped off at a market in some part of Phnom Penh that I don’t know, so I walked around there for a while, bought some weird fruits, ate some coconut covered grilled bananas, took a moto-taxi back to my hotel, washed my feet and legs off, went for a run amongst thousands of people out for a Sunday night cruise on their motos and about a hundred-fifty dancing the Macarena in a public square !?! Turns out it’s a quite a common sight, both on weekend nights and early on weekday mornings. It’s done mostly as exercise.

Observation planning. . .

2009-02-03T11:59:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow, we leave for our first three days of observations. We’re going to the Svay Rieng province which is about 3 hours from Phnom Penh. It’s the small Italy-shaped piece of Cambodia that sticks out into Vietnam in the direction of Saigon. We’re going to talk to a handful of villagers as well as masons, concrete ring producers and retailers—these are the main stakeholders in the latrine value chain. If we have time, we’ll also talk with village chiefs, schoolteachers and village- or commune-level health professionals. We’re also going to talk to someone on the province level of the Ministry of Rural Development. If you’re keen to know more about what we’ll be asking, you can find our interview guide here. We’ll use it as a guide for conversations rather than as a survey.

Kickoff

2009-02-02T08:00:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday, we had our project kickoff. We had about fifteen people from many different organizations: World Bank Water & Sanitation Program, Ministry of Rural Development (MRD), Future Cambodia Fund, LienAid, GRET, Rainwater Cambodia. . . Mike (from IDE) gave an intro to the project and the Demand Assessment and Supply Chain work that IDE has already done. I gave a short intro to IDEO and then we did a few activities. I had everyone do a braindump on who in Cambodia is doing anything regarding sanitation, with specific emphasis on folks doing stuff related to latrine design. I’ve since followed up with a number of those people and have had or will have meetings with them to learn what they’re up to.

We also talked a lot about Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS)—an intensive outreach program originated in Bangladesh that attempts to achieve open defecation free villages purely through education about the positive impact of proper sanitation. To learn more, check out this video. They’ve had great success there, and the MRD has had pretty good success here in Cambodia in its first three years of the effort. CLTS doesn’t advocate for any particular latrine design, and one flaw in the program as experienced by MRD is that the majority of participants tend to build simple dry-pit latrines (a hole in the ground with a wood or bamboo slab over it). These have been collapsing during the wet season due to soil instability, which leaves people without a latrine in the wet season and forces them to redig the pit every dry season—neither of which is good. Seems that even with the simplest of latrines, some reinforcement of the pit will be required.

We then did a quick brainstorming exercise to draw out everyone’s initial ideas of what the final solution will be. There were some great ideas that I’m sure will stick with us to the end.

first ideas. . .

Finally, we got commitment from a core team that will work with me more intensely thought the project: Chhoeurn (MRD), Savath (IDE), Satya (IDE), Sopheak (LienAid) and Hengly (Rainwater Cambodia). None are engineers, none are designers, none are ethnographers!!! But they are all eager to learn and to work on solving this problem. Should be fun.

kickoff peeps

more kickoff peeps

the teams

Market day. . .

2009-02-02T07:35:00.001-05:00

Thought some of you might enjoy these photos from a market I went to on Sunday. Was in one of the neighborhoods of Phnom Penh and, from the looks I was getting, not often frequented by westerners. The market sold pretty much everything—meat, fish, fruit, veggies, clothes, watches, jewelry, packaged foods, grains, housewares (bowls, cups, etc), soaps and detergents, shoes. . . you name it. In the humid, hot day, the smells were intense. And in the fish/butcher area, I was regretting wearing sandals. . .

melting down gold in a ceramic shard crucible

many kinds of eggs. . . not sure what the black ones were, but they were coated with some substance that looked like really nice potting soil

egg lady

incense

squid

intestine

little fish

bigger fish

sausage (each the size of a malted milk ball)

banana alley

Hot dog

2009-01-31T11:37:00.008-05:00

I learned today that in the Chinese culture, foods are either hot or cold. Meaning that they bring you warmth or coolth. This seems to be independent of the spiciness or physical temperature of the food. For instance, rambutan and durian are hot fruits. Turns out that black dogs are also hot. In the cold winter (meaning less than 80F), the number of black dogs on the streets decreases significantly. A guy from IDE commented about a black dog in his neighborhood that has white stripes painted on it. Clearly a family pet. . .

Coconut water

2009-01-30T11:35:00.000-05:00

An aside from today at the IDE compound. The security guard was hacking away at a half dozen or so young coconuts when I was outside taking photos of the latrine pans. This materialized in a glass of fresh coconut water for me about a half hour later. I subsequently learned that in an emergency, coconut water can be used as an intravenous hydration fluid. The salinity and glucose levels are ideal, and the juice is sterile in its shell. Check it on Wikipedia: just don’t use the wrong coconut. Coconut milk (the thick stuff you’re probably thinking of) might clog you up. . .

First day @ IDE

2009-01-27T12:22:00.011-05:00

Monday was my first day on the project. Was picked up at my hotel by Pisith (now the HR officer) and Savuen (the new Logistics officer) and taken to the IDE office just outside of what I glean to be the ring road of Phnom Penh. These aren't great shots, but here's two pics of the office--it's more a big house behind a gate.

Savath (the R&D tech assigned to this project) had collected a few samples of local latrines. These were all pour-flush pans and were sitting in a courtyard outside the IDE office:

ceramic pour-flush pan embedded in a tiled concrete slab--$17

side view of ceramic pour-flush pan embedded in plain concrete slab--$10

concrete pour-flush pan embedded in plain concrete slab--$6.50

Most of the day was spent talking with Mike Roberts (the Cambodia country director for IDE) and Dan Salter (a former regional director for IDE who’s now acting as the marketing consultant for this sanitation project). In parallel with the product development portion which I’ll be spearheading, Dan’s working on the marketing and sales effort. I’ll get more into that later on when I understand it better, but I did want to share some pics from a trip Savath and I took to a ring-producer. These businesses are pretty common throughout the country (and take on a few variations), but they’re typically the ones that produce the concrete rings which are stacked upon each other to line the inside of a latrine pit. It’s not a huge business, however, so these same guys also use similar technique to make concrete pipes of many different diameters to serve irrigation, drinking and waste water needs:

smaller diameter pipes (0.3m), some in molds

close-up of mold

1m dia x 0.5m tall rings--these are stacked to line a latrine pit and weight 80kg each!!

couldn't quite understand if they're reinforced with mesh or just vertical rebar

stacked rings mortared together--the sealing is not always done,

especially when seepage is intended

This particular producer also manufactured concrete slabs with embedded pans (see above). The porcelain pans all come from Thailand or China and are cast (upside down) into the slab. When tiles are used, they’re also cast into the slab in the same step.

mold for casting the pans into the concrete

(not shown is the angle iron sides of the mold)

And lastly, IDE has had great success here in Cambodia with another product: the Rabbit water purifier. In Khmer culture, the rabbit is considered a clever animal, hence the branding. . . It's a gravity-fed ceramic filter that sits in a bucket with a spout. It's quite effective in filtering 'bugs' out of water, but because of the clays used, it adds arsenic to the water. As I understand it, they have to flush 500 bucket-fulls of water through each product before selling in order to eliminate the arsenic. Though I hope I'm wrong. . .

decal on IDE truck

testing of purifiers

the Bugs Bunny-ish rabbit

Latrine 101

2009-01-27T11:56:00.003-05:00

The most basic of basics. . . a latrine usually consists of a pit, a slab and a shelter.

shelter

slab

pit

The pit holds the waste. In its most basic of forms, it’s a hole dug in the ground. Anywhere from the little cat hole you dig when you’re camping to a meter or greater hole dug for a more permanent latrine. They can be dug by hand or by an auger. They can be roughly cylindrical or rectilinear trenches. They can be unlined dirt holes, they can be lined with precast concrete rings or walls, they can be lined with bricks faced with concrete or they can be plastic reservoirs (in the case of the highly advanced septic tank). They can be located right below you or offset to the side. They can be above the water table or below. They can allow seepage or try to block it. They can be used for one poop or twenty years of poops. The best combination of all of these options depends on the money one has to spend, the geology and hydrology present, the number of users and their diet, government regulations, and the type of anal cleaning methods used (paper, leaves, corn cobs, etc.).

The slab is what you stand on. In some cases, it doesn’t exist at all. If it does exist, but simply, it’s a wood platform with a hole through which you poop. More complex and robust ones are made of concrete. If it’s simply concrete with a hole in it, there’s often a cover to close the hole when not in use to keep odor down and bugs out. Nicer ones are concrete with a pan embedded. In this part of the world, the pan is usually built for squatting. The pan is typically made of porcelain, but a cheaper option is a concrete pan. The pan is typically a pour-flush pan which has a U-shaped water trap below it (much like what you find in the West). The trap acts as an odor and insect barrier. When using the pour-flush, you poop into the pan then chase with a liter or two of water. The poop gets pushed thru the trap due to the slug of water and spills out the bottom side into some sort of pit. Some of the water is retained in the trap, maintaining the water seal. For a bit more money and for a nicer, cleaner look, the slab surface can also be tiled. The slab can either rest on soil or on the concrete lining of the pit. Again all of these choices depend on many of the same elements as above, but also include issues of cleanability and status.

The shelter is what surrounds you when you’re pooping. It can be made of pretty much anything, from bamboo and reeds, to metal poles and tarps, to bricks and mortar. It provides privacy and helps keep debris out of the pit. It darkens the environment to help reduce flies. Some designs direct airflow down into the pit and then up thru a vent pipe, helping reduce odors, flies and mosquitoes. Shelters vary dramatically in construction and dramatically in cost. There can be a lot of materiality in them, and there can be a lot of status tied up in their appearance.

Khmer Rouge et al.

2009-01-27T09:08:00.007-05:00

Sunday morning was a downer. Was up early for a 30-minute moto ride out to Cheoung Ek, aka the ‘Killing Fields’. I haven’t seen the movie, but I guess this was the inspiration for the 80s movie of the same name. I can’t really give a full history lesson (mostly because I don’t know it that well, but also because it would take a long time), but in the mid- to late-seventies, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (translated ‘Red Cambodians’) managed to kill somewhere between 700k and 2M Cambodian through a combination of exhaustion, starvation and execution. In what amounted to an attempt at the most rapid back-to-the-land communist revolution in history, the Khmer Rouge forced the entire population of Phnom Penh and other urban centers back into the farms in the matter of days. They forced people to resettle in a direction relative to where they were located in the city the day the Khmer Rouge moved in. If you were in the northern part of the city, you had to go north. If you were in the east, you were forced to go east. Etc, etc., with no regard to keeping families together or allowing people to return to the area of the countryside from where they may have originally come from.

The population of Phnom Penh dropped from over two million to about 25,000 in three days. Nearly everyone was tasked to grow rice, and a lot of it. But yields never matched the aggressive quotas, and the rice that was grown was often consumed by the military or exported to China or other military suppliers, so the classless peasantry starved. All people with ties to the pre-Khmer Rouge government and anyone educated were executed. And any conspirators (whether justified or not) were also executed. Cheoung Ek, the killing fields, was one of the hundreds of places throughout the country where people were executed and buried in mass graves. Much of my visit to Cheoung Ek (and the S-21 prison which I’ll get to in a moment) was chillingly reminiscent of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Much less efficient however. Each prisoner taken to the killing fields was forced to kneel down in front of a mass grave pit and then clubbed in the head or back of the neck. One at a time they filled the graves. Perhaps the most appalling thing about this relative to the gas chambers was that it happen 30 years ago, not 60. No more holocausts? They continue to this day. . .

victims

excavated mass graves

Anyhow, just to finish the depressing part, I went from Cheoung Ek directly to the Tuol Sleng museum which occupies the former site of the S-21 detention center. This is where conspirators, educated elite and political prisoners were brought to be interrogated before being sent to die. The instruments of torture were primal—drowning people, pulling out fingernails, burning, dismembering with pickaxes and shovels, blinding people—but the forced confessions poured out and satiated the government. Regardless, the prisoners never survived. If I remember correctly, only seven of tens of thousands of prisoners lived through the ordeal. They were painters and sculptures who were enlisted to record either the prison events or celebrate the Khmer Rouge rulers. I guess this turned the notion of a struggling artist on its head.

s-21 prison--a former school

wooden cells: about 2m x 0.8m

the rules

And to really finish the downer bit, perhaps all of the Khmer Rouge leaders that lasted to the end of the regime’s end in 1979/80 were allowed to continue living normal lives in spite of their crimes. Pol Pot lived in relative comfort in Thailand until his death of natural causes in 1998. Many of the other leaders went on to high-ranking government positions in subsequent administrations. The UN continued to recognize the political faction of the Khmer Rouge as the administrative body of Cambodia until 1990. As far as I can tell, it was just last week that the UN decided to proceed in trying some of the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders!! Getting toilets out there may be important, but this place has some bigger issues.

Waste

2009-01-26T11:16:00.002-05:00

To the basics. . . the most fundamental reason for building a latrine is to separate humans from human waste. Human waste has some nasty stuff in it. If you want a lot of detail, read this. Otherwise, here’s my summary.

First off, to establish my lack of decorum, I’ll refer to solid waste as poop, shit or feces depending on my mood. Liquid as pee or urine. Together, I’ll call is waste. Exposure to human waste exposes one to contact with myriad communicable diseases: intestinal infections, cholera, typhoid, dysentery, diarrhea, hookworm and shistosomiasis, to name a few. These come in the form of Bacteria (E.coli, cholera, typhoid, leptospirosis), Viruses (poliovirus, rotavirus), Protozoa (giardia) and Parasites (hookworm, roundworm, tapeworm, schisto, liver fluke). All of these are in feces. Schisto, e.coli, typhoid and leptospirosis can come in the urine—it’s perhaps not as ‘sterile’ as people might have you think.

Some of this will become more relevant later, but protozoa and parasites are big, bacteria are medium-sized and viruses are small. Once all these bugs exit the human body, their life spans are limited. As a rule of thumb, bacteria and protozoa are relatively fragile and can last from days to a few months. Viruses and parasites are more robust and can last from months to years. If they stay in the wastewater, their lives are longer than if they move into soil. In soil, they lose their ideal conditions and die or are replaced by other, more mundane bugs. Soil also physically inhibits the movement of the bugs. When moving through soil, the big bugs are captured before the smaller bugs and thus less likely to contaminate ground water. Dry conditions are typically more hostile to the bugs than wet conditions. There are aerobic bacteria (meaning they need oxygen in addition to a food source to survive), anaerobic bacteria (thrive in no oxygen environments) and facultative bacteria (bacteria that can survive in both environments by switching their metabolic processes).

None of these bugs matter, however, unless humans come into contact with them. The vectors of transmission include fecal-oral, skin penetration and insect and rodent. In essence, we get sick via drinking contaminated water, by touching food or our mouths with contaminated hands, by flies moving from feces to food, by mosquito bites from mosquitoes that have bred in waste, by swimming and bathing in contaminated water and by walking on contaminated soil.

Nearly all of this can be prevented by incredibly simple latrines.

In country

2009-01-26T05:18:00.013-05:00

After a 26-hour journey (22 on a plane), I finally arrived in Phnom Penh Friday night. Appropriately enough, the lavatories on the 14-hour leg from DC to Seoul had some issues, so the plane reeked of toilet from boarding on thru. I eventually got immune to the smell, but I think it’s a mild case of things to come.

Anyhow, although this blog will mostly be about all things toilet, I’ll include a bit here and there about my general living in Cambodia. . . today included. The Phnom Penh airport was nicer than expected, and the hustlers outside not so aggressive. The ATMs here dispense US Dollars, and it seems to be the preferred currency. Most people (locals included) seem to be paying in dollars, and the Cambodian riel seems to be mostly used as replacement for US coins (which don’t seem to be used). 4000 riel to the dollar is the current exchange rate, and I’m not sure if it’s pegged or what, but restaurants have it printed on their menus and there doesn’t seem to be much expectation of it moving a lot.

Pisith (the Logistics officer for IDE) met me at the airport and guided me to my temporary temporary home: the Golden Gate Hotel. I’m only here for two days then I walk across the street to my real temporary home: the Golden Comfort Apartment Hotel. Also on the same street are the Goldiana Hotel, Golden Bridge Hotel, Goldie Hotel, Golden Star Guest House and Gold Star Service Apartment. . . . If you name it, it will be. . . Here’s a pic off the front balcony of the hotel of a tuk tuk driver waiting for a fare.

Tuk tuks and moto-taxis (think scooter/moped with you sitting on the back behind the operator) are equally represented in the ‘taxi’ business. No sign of the car option that most westerners would consider a taxi. My first day took me to the Royal Palace, the National Museum and Wat Phnom (the founding temple of Phnom Penh). Here are some pics from those and from just walking around:

throne room in palace

buddhas in Wat Phnom

incense in Wat Phnom

trash can made completely from recycled tires

caged birds at Wat Phnom--setting them free brings some sort of good luck,

but they're trained to return to the cage: a renewable resource.

The problem & the project

2009-01-10T11:30:00.010-05:00

Only about 17% of Cambodian rural poor households have access to latrines which effectively separate human excreta from human contact. The health, environmental and economic impacts of this are vast: Cambodia has an under-five mortality rate of 83 per 1000 live births. In the US, it’s about 7. Cambodia has a Millenium Development goal of reaching 30% coverage by 2015. Yet, at current rates of latrine construction and population growth, 30% coverage won’t be reached for more than 100 years. . . clearly there’s a problem.

IDE conducted studies around the supply and demand for latrines. If you want a bigger summary of the work, click here. Otherwise, here’s my summary: Cambodians are relatively poor. A five-person family at the national poverty level earns about 900USD per year, and rural Cambodians cite cost as the number one reason that they don’t invest in effective latrines. A lot of NGOs are working in Cambodia trying to assist the poor, and a number of these NGOs have historically given away latrines. They tend to build what is, in fact, quite a nice latrine (including an offset tank, pour-flush pan and solid walls and roof: I’ll explain latrine options in a later posting. . .) that costs about 150USD to build. This has caused two problems. First, this latrine is now seen as the ‘ideal’, and people don’t want to build anything lesser. Yet they can’t save up enough money to build it. So, the second problem . . . they wait and see if an NGO will just build them a latrine. Yet, the NGOs can only reach a very small segment of the population so very few get built (of the latrines existing in Cambodia, only 17% of them are provided by NGOS. . . the rest are purchased by the users). As I understand it, other cheaper options exist, but they’re not ‘desirable’. Cambodians are also prioritizing other investments—63% of households own a TV, 10% own a DVD player. . . Note that this is not because of ignorance of sanitation—IDE found a high level of awareness around hygiene issues even if good sanitation practices and investment prioritization do not necessarily follow.

IDE’s hypothesis is that if we can build a desireable, upgradeable latrine system that has an initial investment of 10-20USD (perhaps for the below-ground infrastructure) and that can be upgraded over the years in subsequent, similar-sized investments, a far greater percentage of the population can be reached. It’s expected that a 20USD price point will be immediately accessible to 50% of the population. Note that in keeping with IDE’s market-based philosophy, these latrines will not be give-aways. The distribution, sale, construction, use and maintenance of the latrines must be a self-sustaining enterprise. IDE will only contribute to the initial design, to training and awareness and to marketing.

So that’s the design project as I understand it. A low-cost, upgradeable, desirable latrine. Purchased by the end-consumer. Installed by the end-consumer, perhaps with help from a mason or other skilled tradesman. Probably using locally-available materials, though if there’s huge benefit in getting parts made in high volume outside of Cambodia (plastics, metal, etc.) that’s a potential option. The project starts on January 26^th. . .

Sounds like a good design problem. . .

IDEO and the Rockefeller Foundation

2009-01-05T21:23:00.003-05:00

In collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, IDEO also developed a Design for Social Impact workbook and toolkit. Also a great read and reference, the work aims to better connect design firms to the social sector. It can be downloaded here: https://client.ideo.com/socialimpact/

IDEO & IDE

2009-01-05T20:59:00.002-05:00

Though I’m not sure of the full history of the relationship between IDEO (www.ideo.com) and IDE (www.ideorg.org), I do know that IDEO recently worked with IDE to develop a Human Centered Design (HCD) toolkit that focuses on applying HCD to the developing world context. The work was funded by a grant from the Gates Foundation and was developed through closely working with IDE staff in Ethiopia, Kenya, Zambia, Cambodia and Vietnam. The toolkit looks quite awesome, and I plan to reference it in my work in Cambodia. Luckily, the work is available for use by the public and can be downloaded here: https://client.ideo.com/hcdtoolkit/ .

this blog explained. . .

2009-01-05T20:52:00.002-05:00

Hello all. Welcome to my blog, wanderingjefe. Wandering because I’m headed on a bit of a walkabout. Jefe (pronounced hef-fā) because that’s what a lot of my friends call me. I earned the name on a trip to Baja about seven years ago. Its means ‘boss’ in spanish in a somewhat disingenuous kind of way.

I’m headed to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on January 22^nd for a few months to work with the folks at IDE (www.ideorg.org) on developing a low-cost latrine for use in rural settings. This blog will be about my travels and my work. Why blog at all? First, to keep my colleagues and friends at IDEO up-to-date on what I’ll be working on because I’m going to be involving them a bit in the process. Second , to force myself to thoroughly record and document the project and my travels. Third, to share my experiences with family and friends. And fourth, because I’ve never blogged before, so what the hell.

I’ll be posting a bunch of background info in the next two weeks and then will continue to post explanations and photos as the project progresses. I’m guessing that there will be updates every two to three days, and if there’s not, please bug me. . . Cheers, jrc.