At Christmas, all the malls had decorations in them. It was a big thing. Little Muslim children lined up to sit on Santa’s lap. Whenever I asked, people shrugged and told me that Christmas wasn’t really about religion in Jakarta.

On Friday nights, the malls are packed. The fashionable kids, speaking a mixture of English and Indonesian, flood the white marble floors. The malls have very loud music, and sometimes DJs.

The malls have food courts in them. Just about everything is meat, and just about everything is fried. All the American fast food chains are there. They look like food courts anywhere.

A burger and fries costs about 40,000 rupiah, which is US $4.50. This is very expensive food in Jakarta. The people who work in the mall do not eat in the food court. They eat in the “kantin” out back, a long shack full of traditional food stalls where a meal is five times cheaper. Average income in Indonesia is about $350 per month.

Malls are not for the rifraf. There’s nowhere to sit unless you’re buying. Otherwise everybody would hang out there, because it’s clean and comfortable and smacks of status. You can’t sit on the floor either. Malls are for the middle class, but the middle class is the elite in Indonesia.

Malls have security theatre, because Jakarta has had bombings. Their entrances are guarded by metal detectors. Bored guards check your bags by patting them carelessly, and ignore the metal detectors when they beep. Other guards wave metal detectors uselessly over the truck of each taxi. You can bypass the guards in almost every mall by walking in through one of the shops.

You can also largely ignore security if you’re white. Sometimes it seems like everybody wants to be white. Every pharmacy in Indonesia sells skin-whitening cosmetics. Actually, this happens everywhere in Asia. Maybe it’s because white people are rich.

I spent a lot of time in Jakarta malls. They were comfortable, the food was recognizable, and they had wifi. The blandness depressed me, because I’ve lived in environments that weren’t built for profit. But in Indonesia — and Malaysia, and Turkey, and India, and China, and a great many other places I’ve been — malls represent the future. They’re clean and efficient and astonishingly modern. It makes me sad that consumerism is the vanguard of civilization for so many people.

Indonesia’s first democratically elected president died last night. It’s been a turbulent decade.

The air smells like exhaust, food, people, and kerosene from cooking stoves. Bright orange three-wheeled bajaj taxis are lined up on the street, many more than usual. The sidewalk vendors are thick today, everywhere selling cheap cardboard horns. Their nasal wail pierces the traffic every minute or so. Some people are dressed up and obviously on their way out, though it’s early yet. The street is bustling. I walk as best I can down the sidewalk which is crowded by vendors and food stalls and motorbikes taking shortcuts.

It’s 30 degrees and oppressively humid. It’s always 30 degrees and humid.

Nobody stops at the crosswalk so as usual I have to time my crossing to miss the turning motorbikes. The trick is not to stop. Try to dodge them and they’ll hit you as they aim for where you wouldn’t have been. The haggard prostitute on opposite side gives me a little nod. At night she sometimes grabs me as I walk past. I pass her and make my way through a series of street restaurants built out of carts and plastic tables and awnings over the sidewalk, then turn.

The little alley twists through the innards of a huge block, and it quieter here. It’s lined with small houses, and open sewers a meter deep. On bigger streets the sewer trenches are covered with slabs of concrete, but not here. It smells bad. Children play. A fruit vendor prepares his cart for the evening, arranging bags of cut mangoes around blocks of ice. This is a pretty nice neighborhood, actually. The houses are concrete and right in the center of town. A man casually throws a piece of litter into an empty lot filled with garbage. Skinny cats wander.

I step out of the alley into Jalan Jaksa, the restless and slightly scummy packbacker district. The blowdart seller is talking to two pale young Europeans. He’s been working the street for 28 years. The old drunk guy is sitting on his usual corner in his usual clothes, nodding off. The local fixer nods at me, smiles his best, and thankfully doesn’t ask me again if I want a massage. It doesn’t smell as much here. A man sorts through a pile of trash on the street. From a story in the newspaper, I know that scavenged bottle caps go for about 50 cents per kilo, when sorted. I’m paying $25 US dollars a night for a clean room with air conditioning. A poor expat, a rich Indonesian.

And out of the chaos comes the evening call to prayer, the muezzin’s clear voice ringing out from the little neighborhood mosque. In the fading light it seems a moment of peace.

A motorbike with no muffler shatters it. Traffic resumes. I walk through several more food stalls, including my favorite juice place. In the evenings after work I like to order a fresh starfruit juice.

There’s going to be a big party tonight. Hundreds of thousands of people. It used to be at the center of town around the huge phallic monument but the police have moved it this year, saying that the revelers always trash the place. You can feel the surge of millions toward the center, you can already hear the odd firecracker popping out the last few hours of the decade. There’s nothing to do but make noise in this noisy city, to press ever closer together and celebrate.

Night begins to fall, fast.

A thirty-something woman in a very short skirt saunters down the sidewalk with nonchalant confidence.

I’m almost at the door of my hotel, where I will shower and change.

The proprietor of the coffee stall across the street sits at his one table reading a newspaper, waiting.

The city draws a breath–

The mid-weights are best overall, especially with the usual “air-conditioned-car-ride-into-the-air-conditioned-office” venture that most people have in summer.

The Bangladeshi businessman wears a suit but does not have air-con anywhere. The middle-class Indian cannot afford the gas to have it in his car. The Chinese businessman will certainly be using air conditioning if he can in the next few years, and you wonder why climate change needs to be addressed quickly.

Also on the subject of air-conditioners and development, Lee Kwan-Yew, the infamous former near-dictator of Singapore, once named air-conditioning as the most important invention of the millennium:

The humble air-conditioner has changed the lives of people in the tropical regions. Before air-con, mental concentration and with it the quality of work deteriorated as the day got hotter and more humid. … Historically, advanced civilizations have flourished in the cooler climates.

This choice snippet from the fascinating book, “Singapore the Air-Conditioned Nation: essays on the politics of comfort and control, 1990-2000“.

My guidebook mentioned the strife of an immigrant sprawl, but only in a sidebar, never really saying where these people actually lived. Googling “Istanbul slums” gave almost nothing substantial, at least in English. Millions of people simply don’t exist in the infosphere of a Western tourist. Eventually I began to find references to the Gaziosmanpaşa district northwest of the center, with a population of a million or so. With a reported population increase of 79% in the decade 1990-2000, this is an immigrant city risen whole from the fields: migrants from all over the country and sometimes further, speaking Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, and Arabic, refugees from rural poverty and violence and the war in neighboring Iraq. Gaziosmanpaşa was on my maps, but just barely, a name on the corner of the page.

“Why do you want to go there?” asked my English teacher acquaintance. She was pretty and professional, clearly as much on the fast track as she could get. “There’s nothing there!” she said. Nonetheless she directed me to a tram line; I took it to the end, a stop named Mescid-i-Selam, approximately 20km from the city center (map).

(click for larger)

What I found was not a slum, not exactly — the structures were permanent, and tangles of electrical wires indicated that it was not a place without infrastructure (such as clean water.) Instead it was your basic third-world suburban sprawl, endless five story apartment blocks interspersed with muddy fields of still-empty land. The architecture mimicked downtown, but shabbily: tile mosaic facades had given way to cracked paint, and mold crept over concrete walls and rough brickwork.

But like every low-class neighborhood, there was obvious life here. Laundry hung from balconies, shops on the corners sold tea or sundries or mobile phones. And children, everywhere children! This was a neighborhood where kids still played in the street, and in this demographically young country there are many children. I turned a corner and found an unexpected amusement park, fraying and closed under winter skies.

Every half dozen blocks a mosque soared over the tenements, regular as churches in England. And, yes, there were headscarves, colorful things on the heads of the girls and women in the streets — though the people in the streets were mostly men. Then a woman appeared entirely in a black abaya, Saudi style, only her eyes visible. For a moment I felt something between pity, revulsion, and fear — until another woman in black joined her, and began arguing with the first, and they were just people again, just old fat grandmothers griping in the street.

A old man walked by with a cane, wearing  one of those little knitted Turkish hats. I wondered what village he grew up in, and what changes he’d seen. I wondered what the next generation here would see, and how they would be shaped growing up here, as two young boys found a shiny piece of glass in a construction waste bin.

Satellite dishes sprouted from balconies, blank walls, and rooftops like mushrooms after a rain. The streets were paved and dirty. A line of Thunderbirds ran right through the neighborhood, the towers haphazardly spanning intersections. Men sat on the steps of the mosques and drank tea; I assumed the women were indoors, working, as they always are in the developing world.

But you could make a life here. I have heard that there are shantytowns in other sections of Istanbul,  regions of illegally built dwellings without proper power or water or sewage, but these cities are even further hidden to me; I cannot find their names and no tracks will take me there. I know there must be problems in Gaziosmanpaşa — unemployment, domestic violence, illiteracy, and blunted dreams are not something an outsider with a camera can see, nor could I know how many would wait for how many years for legal-immigrant status. Still, this was not the desperate cardboard slums of Mumbai, or the hard favellas of Rio. People smiled as I walked past. A Kurdish street vendor found out I spoke English and was eager to practice with me as I ate his rice and chick-peas off a paper plate. I was a celebrity just by being American, which struck me as sad; but then, I was about to take the tram back to the posh and polished life of the other, visible Istanbul.

]]> http://jonathanstray.com/where-is-istanbul/feed 3 http://jonathanstray.com/what-internet-censorship-looks-like-part-2 http://jonathanstray.com/what-internet-censorship-looks-like-part-2#comments Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:32:28 +0000 Jonathan Stray http://jonathanstray.com/?p=173 The Turkish Government censors internet access from within the country, as I discovered yesterday when attempting to access YouTube from the Turkish town of Selçuk, as this screenshot shows (click to enlarge):

The English text on this page reads: “Access to this web site is banned by ‘TELEKOMÜNİKASYON İLETİŞİM BAŞKANLIĞI’ according to the order of: Ankara 1. Sulh Ceza Mahkemesi, 05.05.2008 of 2008/402″

Just to complete the irony, I was looking for a video of the Oscar Grant shooting when I first discovered this “blocked site” page.

I have previously reported on internet censorship in the United Arab Emirates. Turkey’s “you can’t see this” page is not nearly as flashy, and the censorship may be less severe: I can reach Flickr from here, for example. However, it is not possible to read the website of Richard Dawkins in Turkey; there even appears to be a more specific (and forthright?) banner page.

(Sadly, Google Translate does not support Turkish — dear lazywebs, can anyone out there give an exact translation?)

This suggests that Turkey’s censorship attempts — all of which can be easily circumvented with tools like Tor — are more concerned with social and religious mores of various sorts, as opposed to the efforts of countries like China where there is a clear political motive underlying the censorship pattern (for example, the Tiananmen Square killings never happened, according to Google China.)

For more, please see the fabulous Open Net Initiative, which tracks and reports on internet censorship worldwide, and has an excellent review article on the Turkish situation. Unsurprisingly, Turkey also has had some recent problems with freedom of expression.

(photo from Ghosts of Alexander)

Actually, all places are complex. It’s hard to understand what this means if you’ve only spent time in your own culture, especially if it’s a reasonbly functional first-world democracy. The developing world in particular can be phenomally fluid and mystifying, and one of the feelings I associate most intensely with travel there is the sense that not all is as it seems, that I can’t quite grasp the true motivations and power relations of the people around me. In my more paranoic moments I even suspect that my interactions are, to some extent, stage-managed by the locals so as to give me a particular impression.

If a recent article by a sociologist studying Afghanistan is any indication, I was right about all of this: the local socio-political scene is very complex, and it is deliberately hidden from “outsiders” of various types. The implications are dire for any sort of foreigner who wants to try to come in and “help.”

To be completely honest, you would have to be an anthropologist who spent many months in a village to understand well just that one community. The situation will be determined by local conditions. It really seems to be a case by case scenario.

So how to interact with these local authority figures and power/survival structures? Are NGO workers and soldiers to act as an agent of the central government, extending its authority to a more local level? Or are they to give more weight to the needs of locals? Or of local authority figures? And is there a way to conduct oneself that can be acceptable to both the central government, local communities and local authority figures? And how does one reconcile those with the goals and needs of the foreign military and international aid community? How do you avoid pushing the losers of local power struggles onto the insurgents’ side?

The piece raises far more questions than answers, so it won’t be appealing to, say, those whe believe that all true solutions are basically simple. Nonetheless, it beautifully captures the sense of labrynthine complexity I’ve felt so many times on the ground — exactly the sort of complexity that inevitably screws up the planning scenarios of international agencies of any sort.

The full article is highly recommended. It even contains actual survey data on local Afghani power structures, not merely anecdote and speculation!

When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

FCC Chairman Newton Minow gave this speech in 1961, decrying the state of the medium that many had hoped would bring new light to humanity. What is to say that the Internet will not sink into the same mediocrity?

There are differences, of course. The internet is (currently) very much an active, two-way medium; the internet is (currently) a very democratic place, where anyone can espouse their worldview to the whole world for only the effort of typing. And the internet is (currently) far too large and diverse to be effectively controlled by any particular corporate or goverment interest.

But I have a morbid interest in dystopia; and already I see signs that not everyone realizes what freedoms we could lose. Like bad science fiction, here are a few scenarios where the internet fails to live up to its almost obscene promise, where it becomes just another “vast wasteland.”

The Telcos Tell us What To Watch

YouTube sucks. The bandwidth is so damn low; they’re too cheap to pay for proper 3D transmission. I’d rather watch the big ‘V’ — you know, the ViABNBCNNFox channel. I guess they get a volume discount on bandwidth. Good thing that Net Neutrality legislation didn’t pass or it would be even more expensive for them.

Useful Information Ends up Costing Money

There used to be a free encyclopedia, but now it’s subscription only. So is the Library of Congress Catalog, now that it’s been privatized. Of course, online academic and scientific journals have always been restricted; there was a brief flash of interest in open-access Journals in the 2000s, but no one really seemed to care, so the idea died. It’s fine though, since everyone can still read these things; it just takes a few bucks. Everyone can read them in this country anyway. There are subsidies in other places for citizen access. I think.

Intellectual Property Law Serves Satan

No, you can’t show those Citibank documents to your friends — they’re all protected by copyright and trade secret law in perpetuity. Of course it’s legal; intellectual property laws serve the public good by creating incentives for content creation. Why, without copyright law, why, our information-scape would be severely impoverished! Incidentally, this is also why Wikileaks was shut down.

We Forget the Developing World, Again

BBC World News 12 July 2025:

Internet Still not Useful in Africa

A new study released today by UNDP Africa showed that despite a decade of near-uibiqutous access to the internet, those living in African nations are still ten times less likely than their European or Asian peers to consult the web for news, information, or services. “The problem is media formats,” explained the study’s author. “Africans access the web on their phones through the existing 5G mobile networks. The screens are very small, so most web pages don’t view well. Also, most of the major news sources and reference works are poorly represented in native African languages.”

Search Monopoly Goes Bad
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 never happened. If they did exist, where is the record? There’s nothing in the national archives in Bejing, and you can’t find it on Google. What do you mean, check another search engine? Hey look: it says here we’ve now at war with Eurasia!

The Mainstream Wins

Yeah, of course I’m online. Er, I really just use MySpace and Facebook. There are other big sites out there I guess, but I’ve never heard too much about them. I mean they never have any games or whatever.

We Had Stars in Our Eyes

We thought that everyone having free access to the world’s information was enough. We were so dazzled by our new collective intelligence, we never thought of what else might be important. And that is the subject of my next article.

]]> http://jonathanstray.com/how-the-internet-can-fail/feed 1 http://jonathanstray.com/kathmandu-questions http://jonathanstray.com/kathmandu-questions#comments Fri, 28 Nov 2008 20:58:11 +0000 Jonathan Stray http://jonathanstray.com/?p=143 4 April 2008, to Jenafir

I’m in Kathmandu and thinking of you. I visited the Swayambhunath temple this afternoon, up on its hill overlooking the valley. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful, and it opened me up in the way only real beauty can, cut through all the jaded traveler in me. I haven’t been home since we worked together a year ago – you know that. It will be time for me to return to San Francisco soon. But what I wanted to talk to you about today is the two little boys that accompanied me to the temple and back.

You know how it goes – they sort of attached themselves to me and the one with better English elected himself my guide. Which is fine; they were lovely kids, very bright and very entertaining and fun to play with. They especially appreciated when I made monkey noises to scare off the touts trying to sell me prayer flags and singing bows. So we went up the 365 steps, and I stood on the terrace at sunset and marveled at the completely splendid Stupa, and the panoramic view of this ancient Pagoda city being eaten by its own slum suburbs. When we began the long walk back from the temple, it was very dark. Kathmandu has blackouts for three hours every afternoon.

I knew it was coming. They were shy about it.

“Excuse me, can you buy me some milk?”

“No.”

“Some milk, only.”

“No, sorry. I know this one.” You too, my international friend, you know this hustle. The milk powder turns out to be strangely expensive, and the kids sell it back to the shopkeeper later.

Some chatting in Nepali among themselves. A few minutes later, “Some food?”

“You’re hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should go home. You are children, go home and ask your parents to feed you.” I  wanted so badly for the world to work this way.

“Okay… we need also kerosene.”

“Again, this is your parents’ job.”

“Kerosene is very expensive.”

“I know that.”

I must admit I don’t have your patience, Jenafir. I don’t have your lifetime of practice with compassion. Every day I try to give at least a smile to all the desperate people who ask me for help; most days I fail. It gets to me.

“Look. Are you my friends or are you beggars?”

“We are your friends!”

“Then stop begging from me.”

“Please help us. We are hungry.”

“That’s it. I’m leaving.” And I walked away. I sure showed them a lesson. It felt terrible.

I calmed myself, turned around, motioned them over. I asked them to sit with me on some steps as night fell. Unhealthy dogs wandered in the street, and a kerosene lantern glowed red inside the shack across the road. Still no power.

“Listen,” I began, “what do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to do?”

No answer.

“Do you want to, um, build buildings? Or be a policeman? How about flying an airplane, would you like that?”

It took a long time for him to answer. I had to repeat the question, give more examples.

“I want to be shopkeeper.”

“A shopkeeper! That’s great… but, are you sure? You sure you wouldn’t rather be an airplane pilot?”

“I don’t know how to fly an airplane.”

“No. But you can go to school and learn.”

A flash of a smile. That’s all I wanted. Just for a second I wanted him to believe that he could be whatever he wanted. I don’t even know if it’s true, but I wanted him to believe that.

“You can learn anything you want,” I pressed on, probably uselessly. “You can choose to be anything you want.”

Silence.

“So why do you choose to be a beggar?”

“I am not a beggar.”

“You keep asking me for things without offering anything in return. That makes you a beggar.”

Silence.

“Will your parents be angry that you did not get money from foreigners today?”

“No.”

“Do you do this every day?”

“No. Only it is finished school exams now. Sometimes we have holidays.”

And that was it. The two children chatted amongst themselves but wouldn’t speak to me further. I told him I was going if he didn’t want to talk to me. He wouldn’t meet my eye. Did I shame him? Did I go too far and crush that spark I hoped I saw?

I walked off into the gloom, over the unpaved unlit roads, dodging rickshaws and bicycles and scooters, with that same old fury. Furious with the world, with him, with myself for handling it so badly. Empty and opened and full of ache at the same time. Realizing that I know very little about communicating with children. Wondering what you would have done, my friend. Wondering, again and always, what might actually make a difference in their lives. Wounded to see a spirit so young already crushed. Wondering if they would ever burn like I was burning right that second. Beginning to cry in the dark.

We do deserve better; I for one don’t particularly enjoy squatting in the bushes. The World Toilet Organization agrees, and sponsors World Toilet Summits and World Toilet Expos, “wherein all toilet and sanitation organizations can learn from one another and leverage on media and global support that in turn can influence governments to promote sound sanitation and public health policies.” They also started the first World Toilet College, providing training in toilet design, maintenance, school sanitation, disaster sanitation, and implementation of sustainable sanitation systems.

Okay, you can snicker now. I know I am.

This would be even funnier if it wasn’t actually serious — human waste is a major disease carrier if not handled correctly, and an awful lot of people are still just pooping on the ground or in the river. But let’s not dwell on negatives; in the carefree spirit of World Toilet Day, I thought I’d briefly discuss, and show some pictures, of the types of toilets I’ve encountered in various parts of the world. Travel yields many surprises, and, astonishingly, there were places where I had to learn to wipe my ass all over again. (“Don’t you know how to use the three seashells?” indeed.)

France
France uses mostly Western-style flush toilets, though they used to have many more squat toilets, and you’ll still encounter them in public washrooms outside of Paris. The Morlaix train station in Brittany– I remember it well. I was 19, naive, and on another continent for the first time in my life. I walked into the stall and might have actually said “what the fuck?” out loud when I saw only a porcelain basin set into the floor. That was a day of firsts: the first time I ever rode a high speed train, and the first time I ever experienced a toilet from another culture. The next day was no less revolutionary: I discovered a bidet in my cheap Paris hotel.

Thailand
Squat toilets, as is usual in Asia. However, no toilet paper. This was my first “three seashells” moment. The answer is that rubber hose connected to the faucet. Which is also why the floor is always wet, ewww. The squat toilet may  flush automatically with a lever or button; otherwise, you just run more water down the hole. Western toilets are nonetheless common in the cites and becoming more so, Public washrooms in, e.g. malls will have a combination of both western and squat toilets in different stalls, while fancier places such as nice hotels might have Western toilets only.

India
Not a good country for toilets. Almost universally squats, of course, and almost universally not the kind that flush. This a country all about buckets. The bathroom is a nasty little humid, smelly room where the floor is always wet. If there’s plumbing, there’s a faucet to fill the buckets, which are these days invariably cheap made-in-China plastic, typically red or green. In the really rural areas, there often isn’t plumbing. This means that someone has actually hand-carried the water into the bathroom for you, filling up the buckets at the river or the well. You better not use it all before tomorrow, lest you have nothing to flush with in the middle of the night. This precious water is also used for washing your ass and your wiping hand (the left) and also for bathing, which is performed by squatting on the floor and pouring water over your head.

Of course if you’re very poor (like several hundred million people in India) you just bathe in the river. Here are some people without toilets:

Indian Trains
I truly love the Indian train system. I do not love indian train toilets. Pee +  moving train = nasty. Also, the toilets are just holes onto the tracks. Between every pair of rails in India there are two stripes of old dried shit, one for the bathroom on either side of the car. Lest ye judge, European trains used to be engineered exactly the same way.

United Kingdom
No real surprises here, in the country that invented the water closet. However, you’ll still a lot of the classic elevated cistern design — works the same, but the tank is overhead. Cheerio.

Indonesia
In Indonesia we have the Mandi. The Mandi is a room, and it is also a cistern. The Indonesian bathroom is a small room with a concrete or tiled floor (fancy!) with a squat toilet set into it, and a big tiled cistern along one wall. This cistern, usually rectangular, is the Mandi proper. You extract water from it with a scoop, using only your clean right hand, and pour it over your backside and your wiping left hand. The geometry of this manuever confused me for weeks. Fortunately, I eventually found signs in a friendly tourist restuarant named “Bedudal” (click to enlarge and read the very helpful text)

Nonetheless, Western-style toilets are slowly appearing in Indonesia, and the locals are every bit as confused by this as a Kansas housewife facing her first bidet. The problem is the squatting habit: squatting on the seat of a Western toilet just leads to nasty. Also, the squat fixture is set into the ground and is a drain, so you just throw water at it to clean it, but this doesn’t work so well with a western toilet. The result is a mess, a stinking wet toilet seat that no one wants to sit on. It’s somehow reassuring to know that they’re just as confused by our bathrooms as we are by theirs.

Russia
Regular old Western-style toilets, and they use toilet paper. The only real hazard here is getting scowled at as you exit. There’s an inevitable old babushka who was waiting forever for that stupid foreigner to finish up. The Russians are not a happy people.

West Africa
There are squat toilets and western toilets and even the occasionally working flush toilet in the cities; outside of that, it’s buckets again. In the spring of 2007 I lived for a month in a little town in Northern Mali. The house was made out of dirt; let’s just start there. The bathroom had a little square stall in it, and once each day the woman of the house hand-carried water in buckets from the nearby well (only a few blocks). Like India, you squatted and poured water over yourself, and the “shower” drained through a hole in the wall directly onto the dirt street outside. The toilet proper was a latrine just outside the house; that is, a deep pit with a wooden lid over it, with a hole for pooping through.

Latrines are a relatively good arrangement, in that they are really quite sanitary. In many places, even in medium-sized towns, people just go in the river, like this man.

This sounds terrible, and it is– but even the sewage systems usually just dumped waste directly into the river. This would be bad in an industrial country, but it’s even worse when many people also bathe in the river. It spells D-I-S-E-A-S-E.

That Boat on the Niger River
I have to say that my favorite toilet ever was on a wooden cargo boat heading up the niger river. It was just a hole in the rear of the boat, by the tiller, but the view was marvelous, and there were two very friendly goats to keep you company.

Ethiopia
Ethiopia is not actually a desert, except for the eastern parts. Nevertheless, there’s not a lot of water. Per-capita daily water consumption is 20 litres, compared to over 200 for the United States. This means there’s not nearly as much flushing and washing going on as one would like. In the capital and the larger cities, water comes out of the tap. In smaller places, it’s typically stored in big cisterns filled every few days by the water truck. Everyone else carries it on their backs from the well. This, of course, is women’s work.

Anyway, toilets are squat type, where available. But rural Ethiopia is one of the poorest places in the world, and many, many villagers don’t have any toilets at all. Not even latrines. There are major development projects in this country just to dig latrines. This improves health by limiting the spread of disease, both by directly containing waste material and by reducing the number of flies, which are vectors for several unpleasant things (for example it’s suspected that they spread trachoma, which eventually makes you blind.) The required technology is not fancy by any means; a latrine is just a hole in the ground and a couple of  planks to squat over. Still, occasionally someone does get ambitious, dries clay in the sun, and constructs a genuine brick shithouse.

Oman
The usual developing world pattern: squat toilets, no toilet paper, wipe with your left. Then eat with your right! Like many ancient cultures, the traditional Middle East lacked both a) soap and b) utensils. This makes it very important not to confuse these two hands. And no, no one is left-handed.

Annapurna Base Camp, Nepal
Inside each stall was a pretty standard squat-with-bucket. But I have no idea where the water came from or where the poo went or how it was disposed of, because — here’s the thing — this at 4000 meters elevation, and the local temperature is well below freezing for most of the year. Ah, the mysteries of Nepal.

Japan
I’ve never been to Japan. My friend Nicole tells me that the toilets there break down into basically three types.

1. Squat toilet with flush
2. Western toilet with flush
3. Robot washlet

That’s right: ROBO-TOILET. I have no idea how this really works, but apparently it’s the height of comfort, sanitation, and good taste. Actually, it’s much more than style: toilet flushing is a major water consumer. Not only are low-volume toilets far more common in Japan, but some washrooms recycle the waste water from the sinks into the toilets. This is sustainability genius. It makes me absolutely certain that I live in a primitive culture, and so do you.

In conclusion
Toilets are important. Not only are they a critical piece of sanitation infrastructure, but many of the world’s toilets are exceedingly nasty. I’ve never bothered to photograph my least favorite toilets of all time, but that’s probably because I couldn’t wait to get out of there. We in the west with our flush toilets and toilet paper and sparkling shower stalls are the exception; the rest of the world thinks a bathroom is a wet, smelly place, when they have a bathroom at all. A good toilet means you probably have a very good quality of life, so enjoy yours. Happy World Toilet Day!

1. The developing world is dirty, and it smells. Stepping off the plane in Bangkok, that very first time, I was assaulted by the air, some rich humid mix of curry and diesel and flowers and shit. Garbage lines the streets and rings the fields around every town; men routinely piss on the streets, and few cities have public trash cans.

2. The people aren’t white. They’re brown or yellow or black; they have thick Semitic eyebrows or delicate Asian eyes or wide African noses. And everywhere you go — Africa, China, India, Russia — darker skin means lower socioeconomic class, even if the comparison is  between lighter and darker castes or tribes  within the same country. Light skin represents wealth and power at all scales of humanity.

3. Nothing works properly. Houses are cheaply built and products cheaply made, but it’s more then frugality. Nothing is expected to work properly. Doors and cars and lights that could be fixed with a moment’s handiwork remain broken forever. The trains are hours or sometimes days late, when they’re running at all.

4. The people don’t speak English. The signs aren’t in English, the menus aren’t in English, and the newspapers aren’t in English. You are suddenly and catastrophically illiterate. Surprise! There are other alphabets. Sleeping children dream in foreign languages.

5. In many places, no one else can read either. They never got much schooling. Things that we take completely for granted — such as germ theory, arithmetic, or the very concept of sexism — are undiscovered countries to much of the world. Without writing, “facts” can only spread from person-to-person through an endless game of broken telephone.

6. Holy shit television everywhere! They don’t have clean drinking water, but they have a TV. Every year China turns out millions of small TVs and VCD players that run off a car battery. I’ve seen satellite dishes nailed to trees in the middle of the jungle.

7. The whole world has phones too. There may not be reliable electricity, or any electric service at all, but there’s definitely a cell tower nearby. And these supposedly backwards, poor people often have advanced phones which also serve as MP3 and video players, because a phone is the household’s one piece of expensive consumer electronics. The internet is going to reach the rest of the world first through phones.

8. Terrible plumbing. The indisputable signs of rich industrialized society are hot and cold running water, faucets that don’t drip, drains that don’t reek, and all the infrastructure required to make this a reality, from aquaducts to sewage treatment plants. Much of the rest of the world shits into a hole and drinks from the river, and providing clean water and sanitation might be the number one thing that could be done to reduce world poverty and disease. But some days I wonder if that’s all beside the point, because of the hot shower.  Among all the niceties of civilization, the hot shower is the luxury I miss most strikingly when I’m living somewhere where the houses are made of dirt.

9. Safety has a different meaning. It’s wrong and small to say that life is cheaper in poor countries — we rich don’t cry any harder over our dead than anyone else — but the citizens of developed countries accept a lot more risk than we do: ungrounded wiring, firetrap tenements, working without hard hats and welding without goggles. At the same time, what a rush to be to choose your risks for yourself! Oh to ride on top of a moving train!

10. Yes, they’re poor. Figures such as “living on two dollars a day” are somewhat deceptive, because the cost of living is incredibly low in poor countries, and two dollars might well buy you all the daily rice you could want. Even so, it’s not nearly enough for a life, and a huge fraction of the world’s citizens are living literally day-to-day, scrounging for their basic needs. This sucks deeply in a way that it’s very hard for a middle-class child to imagine. It’s also worth remembering that imported mass-consumer items (such as housewares and electronics) are already sold at near-zero margins in the industrialized world, meaning that the basic material objects of living often aren’t any cheaper in poor countries. When I walk down the street in Dakar I carry in my backpack a laptop worth two year’s salary.

11. The structures of society are suddenly visible by their lack. The government is probably unstable, there is little or no public health system, and public servants might have to be bribed to do their job. Scams are widespread because there’s no contract law and no courts to prosecute petty crime. You get used to handing policemen cash on the street, and the price of a visa depends on who’s at the window taking your money. I once bought insulin for a desperate diabetic; he begs for it every month.

12. Their culture is different, their culture is the same. I have been consistently astonished at how values differ between cultures. Depending on where you live, the most important thing in life may be hard work, religion, family, honor, or freedom. But by showing us what can be different, travel also clarifies what is the same in all humans; and although it seems terribly easy for people to be pompous, greedy, and cruel, universal human nature seems also to be kind, imaginative, and generous.