Or is it necessary to involve people directly with scarcity and wastefulness for such concerns to stick and be acted upon?
Refugees and homelessness. War and peace. Scarcity and obnoxious wealth. Fires and floods... What makes the impact that wakes people up enough for them to do something about such ugliness?
For someone ornery like me, shock and awe works best.
Bomb-less shock and awe like the Habitat for Humanity Latrine Build in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, I did in 2011.
When about 15 of us Habitat workers first walked down the uneven and worn stone street we were escorted by 15 cops. The few grownups and kids who populated that early morning street were NOT giving us smiles.
That slippery street we walked down had 2-3' trenches on each side, some lined with stones, some not. They were filled with trash, junk, plastic, etc. They were the sewage system for garbage and monsoon rains.
Just across and inside of the trenches, all the slum dwellings had some sort of wall made of rusty scraps of tin, junk wood, cardboard, and anything else they could find.
I had been on about 10 Habitat home-building projects. But this was my first latrine-building project, and it almost didn't flush out.
"Boots," our group leader, was appalled with the unsanitary condition of the yard, with small streams flowing everywhere and chicken and animals roaming about. She complained to Habitat's Ethiopian organizer. Boots did not want the crew of over 10 women and two men to work under such conditions.
Some of the police who guarded us as we walked down that mean street in Arada Sub City Woreda and the proud but poor residents listened to the "sanitary conditions" argument, but Ramsey, Boots' husband, and I walked 10-12 feet away to the site where the latrine was marked for building. We took two shovels and started digging.
The argument went on long enough for Ramsay and I to discover and wonder.
Wonder why the holes we were digging so often came across plastic bags. When we discovered enough pieces of squat-able wood and tied the wood to the incriminating evidence in the plastic bags, we began to understand.
Those plastic bags were trying to contain a little of what was flowing through the yard, especially during the monsoon, that the chickens, children, and other animals wobbled through with and without sandals -- and that we would be working in.
Boots relented. Amidst the sad confluence of plastic bags and poverty, we built that latrine and part of another. Thank God for Boots and for confluence-protecting work boots.
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