How My Life Went to Shit (in a good way)

Running a nonprofit is hard, really hard. Nobody gets into this line of work because it's easy or pays well. For people like those on our team, we do this because we feel it's what we have to. The following is the story of how Manavta came to be and why:

When Nabeel and I were living in Nepal, we saw things that boggled our minds. How can there be so much beauty in a place so rife with poverty and squalor? Diarrhea is something we knew to be mildly unpleasant, something we had only experienced after eating bad seafood or binging on lactose. We certainly did not know it to be something that kills 1.5 MILLION children each year. Together with pneumonia, the two are responsible for more than 40% of all child deaths around the world (UNICEF, 2009). We saw women and girls marginalized to the point of forfeiting their educations: let me explain...

I was teaching english at a rural public government school called Mahindra Adarsh Mavi HSS, in a place called Imadol (ko Krishna Mandir). There are a quite a few brick factories in the area, and most of my students (classes 7-10) either worked at the factories or were domestic help in homes nearby. Most of them were sent to Kathmandu to study, their families being from villages far away where education is not at all accessible. On one of my days off, I was on a walk with one of my housemates Rob - talking about how the girls in my classes tended to miss school for a week every month. I was asking him what I had done wrong, when he dropped the M-bomb.

Menstruation.

First of all, I have never gotten my period (I think it has something to do with being a man) - so the thought had never crossed my simple mind. I finally caught on to the fact that these girls were stuck practicing Chhaupadi; a practice where Nepalese women are routinely forced to live in a shed for the duration that they're menstruating, as they're considered impure (Here's a Globe and Mail article about it). As written in that article, "The tradition was outlawed by Nepal's Supreme Court in 2005, but has been slow to change." I couldn't believe what I hadn't understood for over six weeks. I started talking to all of my Nepalese friends, asking what could be done. Overwhelmingly, they said the same thing: build toilets. So many rural schools in Nepal have no sanitation facilities, meaning that girls have no place to change the rags they use when menstruating. Going to school for the day and not changing these rags leads to disease and infection. For many girls, school isn't worth the risk. When toilets are present, feminine hygiene products can be changed and girls can reclaim access to education.

This led to our pilot project. Fast forward two years, and here we are. Our mission is simple: to empower leaders to bring safe sanitation to their communities through education. Safe sanitation benefits everyone, while enabling women and girls to reclaim access to their education.

In the coming weeks, we'll post about our approach to community and school-led sanitation, cultural taboos and general nonprofit best practices. But honestly, all of that would mean a lot less if you didn't know the story of how me and my team's lives went to shit.

A Lighthearted Bowel Movement

My name is Nabeel, Toilet Nerd and cofounder of the Manavta Project. Martin, our pretty boy Toilet Enthusiast and I, are ecstatic about this new website and hope our fans will take some time to engage with us on our journey. To start, I figure I should talk about what brought us here in the first place. Poo.

Most of the time, it's pretty awkward talking about poop. The very thought of it is repulsive in some cultures (including my own). Open defecation isn’t something we casually talk over wine– sorry ladies. There exists a poo taboo. People shy away from talking about this stinky issue.

I recently did a lecture at the University of Alberta for some fellow students and there arose some interesting questions. People loved the idea of how poop and urine is so useful for agriculture. In light of this, one particular student expressed to me how she couldn’t grapple with the idea that people defecated out in the open – she was mortified. It's a fact that most of the human species on this planet have nowhere to sh*t (almost 2.5 BILLION people!). For those reading this blog, we have all benefited from modern sanitation and the thought of wiping yourself bare in the middle of a forest is not ideal.

Every single day, young girls are subject to rape and harassment - many of them just looking for a safe toilet to use in the middle of the night. This issue is even more complex when they reach the age of puberty, as girls and women have nowhere to change pads when they're menstruating.

Especially since the United Nations illustrious MDG targets are failing to be met, we are seeing some organizations step up to the plate on these issues.. The hardest hit countries such as India are hot markets for private institutions, who basically do what the government should be doing. I am keen to see how Modi's push for a ‘Toilets before Temples’ campaign in India plays out. 

At Manavta we are all about keeping the idea of poop light. We want to embrace this often-messy bodily function and shed some light on how lucky we are in the western world.  Next time you decide to destroy your bathroom's aroma, consider yourself lucky and be thankful that you are cleaning yourself with two-ply (or three-ply if you're really living the dream) and not a leaf or a dirty rag.