A Shitty Story

This piece of writing is shit, get out while you can.

Honestly.

Lot of poo-talk coming up.

Ok I warned you.

I began writing this article when I joined the organisation I work for today. The biggest boss asked the new employees to write our "Sanitation Story". I am not sure if I was supposed to take a look at my life with a sanitation lens or sanitise my lens on life. I half wrote that piece and left it alone, like almost everything I do. Honestly if my life was a short story, it would be left incomplete, trailing, gathering dust and moths for years. After spending more than three years working here, I started going through these half baked lines of verbal diarrhoea and thought there is something here I should explore, and finish, for a change. So here is a small part of it, just the beginning because the middle is not written yet, I am still living it.

Sanitation as a word was introduced long after I was able to think coherently and I don't remember when I just knew it. My mother says I, as an infant, never wet my diaper, which back then was mostly made of cloth instead of the super-soaking varieties we find today’s parents using. My signal for safely passing urine was the opening of the cloth, and my response was so well conditioned, that the vaccination lady had to bear the brunt of it. When she opened my diaper for sticking the injection in my tiny rear, I responded as I should have. So since the very beginning, I was a hygiene conscious baby, or so my mother says.

For a long time I did not use public toilets at school or any other public place for that matter. From a very early age I was uncomfortable with using dirty toilets, and it was drilled into me by my mother and the little experience I had, that most public toilets were always dirty. This would mean restricting water and diet to ensure I don’t need to visit the girls’ lavatory in the middle of class. I saw little boys my age using the bushes in the gardens for the same purpose and wished I could do the same, I didn’t know then that this was unsanitary. In retrospect I think they must have seen adults around them doing so, understood this is acceptable by society and adopted it, it is after all damn convenient.

Even today before overnight bus journeys hydration stops, because one can not imagine the state of the toilets the bus will stop in. It is the stuff of nightmares, the stench in most public toilets is potent enough to wake a dead person or kill one who is alive. If it is a train journey I am on, oh boy, drinking and eating are restricted to small sips of water and unhealthy junk food which will refuse to pass my body before I reach a clean toilet. 

When I started working where I do, I realised clean toilets are liked, people want there surroundings to be clean, but it is not a need that is on the lowest wrung of Maslow's hierarchy. Imagine my surprise, to find out that the community living in front of the office of my organisation (that works in the sanitation sector) is actively rejecting our involvement. They are good with the solid waste lying around the colony, they don't want to see there immediate surroundings devoid of random flying plastic waste. 

It has been three years to the day I saw this community and nothing has changed. That forced me to question my own obsessive need for clean toilets and litter free surroundings, and wonder at how differently people prioritise there need for sanitation and cleanliness. Again, I urge anyone who has stumbled upon this random ramble to note that this wondering is not coming from judgement, I am hyper aware of my privilege, and it is this privilege that makes me wonder how basic clean surroundings aren't a necessity for a community. It is a question which will perhaps guide me through the rest of my story, till I seek an answer to it.

With this I continue my journey, to write my own story, or more likely half write it and leave it hanging...