Ever see a child crying but notice there are no tears coming down his eyes? It’s mouth and tongue are all dry from crying so much not giving it a rest. Kicking, wining and screaming with their posture all weird like their abdomen has sunken from sitting on its ass too long, or like the kid is from some poor 3rd world country and he has Diarrhea so bad, that it’s dehydrated?
Well if you didn’t here’s a funny story…
I while back I went to watch a Bollywood film titled “Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham” (sometimes happy sometimes sad) with my family because of its great revues for tackling hard social issues. To my surprise the film was this warm and fuzzy Kodak Moment that lasted for three hours in Hindi. The most memorable moment of this experience was the intermission. I got to stretch my legs and take a break from a broken family caused by India’s ancient and irrelevant cast system preventing a womanizing macho ego eccentric father to allow his son to marry a smoking beautiful woman. (I was at the edge of my seat).
Upon leaving the theater to get some air, I noticed this hilarious moment when I saw an Indian father walk with his two sons out the theater with tears down his eyes. His sons had this precious expression like “he’s my dad?”.
Then that little kid’s face reminded me of another Indian kid I saw at the movie theater. This kid comes walking out the bathroom crying to his dad weeping “mommy took me to the ladies room”. I thought to myself what a funny sentence, what a funny kid, and how uncomfortable that must have been for him.
Finally as I make it past the doors and outside the theater. As I look around me reading random fliers pinned on the wall near the entrance, I see a poster asking for donations to children in India to have proper access to toilets.
I thought, really? India’s a third world country with all kinds of issues and they’re worried about toilets?
I made laps around my head thinking how eminent could the cry for toilets in India really be? I know there are poverty stricken zones that are suffering but how many Indian children could possibly not have access to toilets in the twenty first century?
Well if we fast forward to today I found out it’s bad. Really really really bad….
How bad? like 2.5 billion without a toilet and one thousand children dying per day from Diarrhea bad.
How’s that for size?
I got sick to my stomach not by the thought of Diarrhea, although it didn’t help, but by the number of children alone not including middle aged men, women, and senior citizens.
According to the NDDIC (National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse) (http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/diarrhea/) the national average of children in the United States at age five will have somewhere in the rage of seven to fifteen episodes of diarrhea.
For newborns and infants Diarrhea can cause dehydration as fast as a day or two. But it’s comforting to know that if your child may be sick and has the runs, all you have to do is call your doctor, go to the hospital or even rehydrate your child and keep them in a cool, calm, and quit environment.
Unfortunately in third world countries like India a mother can’t simply relocate their child in a more comfortable location. It’s not as simple as that. When you’re poor, and live in a city with a grid system similar to a sardine can, how do you relocated your child to a “cool, calm, and quit environment?”. Your husband breaks bricks to make money and when I say money I mean change for a day’s work in city like Delhi where it can get up to 115 °F and lows at 94 °F (http://www.timeanddate.com/weather/india/delhi).So image you live in Delhi and it’s 115 °F at 2pm and you want to go do the #2, where do you go? Outside where the bacteria, viruses, and parasites are on walking surfaces and air born. With the heat combined with the mass amounts of shit, the process of poisoning innocent people slowly take place on a cellular level. It’s like leaving a bad deed forgotten for so long it’s grown strong and found you.
Diarrhea is in most cases are caused by food intolerance, or reaction to medicine. In this post I’ll be covering viral, bacterial, parasitic, and intestinal diseases that lead to Diarrhea. One of the most devastating results of Diarrhea is a simple lack of enough fluid, Dehydration.
On a report by About.com http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/indiapopulation.htm) titled India’s Population, India is expected to be the most populated country surpassing even China by 2030, an estimated 1.53 billion people, a number that leaves me worried for the 60% of Indian woman without proper hygiene, elders with declining immune systems, and especially children stuck in a situation they did not get themselves into.
How did we get here? How are we in deep shit, so bad that we can predict what it will look like when it hits the fan?
I think when we go back to the Video I posted prior to this posting, we might remember an amazing line by Adam Yamaguchi in Current TV’s “the world’s Toilet Crisis” story that was a one line knock out that summed up so much of the entire story. “There are more Indians with access to a Cell phone then toilets”. Wow….
Looking at where India has excelled and progressed, we see the youth especially have grown fond of dwelling on the bells and whistles, something I find understandable considering what little they had and what they made of themselves. But it’s not the progress I’m against, it’s what choose to do best in and the order of priorities by the government, and by the people as well. Which brings me to my conclusion, globalization and it’s lack of maturity and responsibility can be, in my opinion, part accreted to India’s current demographic of less than 60%, (that’s 1.15 billion) access to text messaging instead and wide land masses turned into open sewers.
One of the more sentimental things that the Tibetan community did recently did was creating this nice “Thank you India” song. It’s cute but it’s light and not nourishing enough for what India has done. I’m more impressed by what a Tibetan community in southern India’s Ooty did during the recently flooding. The Tibetan community there, a rather smaller one in ratio to other Tibetan communities in India, had donated food, clothing, blankets, and any other supplies to help comfort the Indians who lost so much from the flood. You would think a “Thank You India” would be something you would write on the way to India from Tibet, but I guess it’s better late than never, but wouldn’t being late take away from the gesture? whatever…
Either way the reality is one thousand dead children due to something as simple as public toilets? It’s sad to think such a obvious priority could have been over looked or forgotten. If the sewage system in LA had failed in a single day, there sewers manholes would be launched in the air by raw sewage over flowing. Some valuable arguments can obviously be made and I’m sure I missed a couple big ones, but I think I’m right to say it’s not right to prioritize Bollywood over access to toilets and underground sewage systems.
If anyone can say anything to argue that please feel free… I would love to hear how seeing Amit Tab is more important than seeing a healthy child. And if not that then at least give a poor family one less thing to worry about.
India is such a beautiful land that birthed such activist wanna bez like myself, look at that how you wish, but those who follow the mantra have a tunnel vision demand for progress in technology and business that has left a polarized society where the rich are extremely wealthy and the poor are almost worthless in comparison. If you where to create a pie chart of the rich, average, and poor, the middle class slice would be so thin that you would have to zoom in to see it.
India’s social and especially hygiene issues leave me to argue it’s worth looking into social philanthropy as opposed to economic philandering. Just a thought…
But like I said before there are many variables to this situation and to grasp it all is far beyond me at this moment, but I think it is possible, and further more I think it’s possible to fix the situation into a hospitable and bearable condition for people live in. Poverty is a problem by the individual and the society, but toilets being accessible is something the establishment, should find to be a no brainer.
