Expertise needed. . .

Any chance any of you (or your friends) can help with the following:

1.  For the concrete experts. . . desperately trying to find a lightweight highly permeable concrete mixture.  Have looked at pervious concretes, but am trying to get lighter.  Durisol makes a cement-bonded wood fiber concrete that seems like it'd be an ideal material for us to use, but I don't know anything about it.  And we don't have wood.  Lots of bamboo, coconut fiber, sugar cane fiber and rice straw, though.  Also curious about using rice husk ash as a partial cement replacement.  If you know much about concrete, in particular lightweight, permeable, natural fiber concretes, I'd love to have an email exchange and get advice on admixtures and how to treat natural fibers to avoid rot, insect damage or concrete degradation from the sugars.

2.  For the geotech experts. . . am looking to understand the loads that exist at the bottom of a latrine pit. . . any good equations or rules of thumb?  Trying to understand how strong the latrine pit lining needs to be.  Typical holes are 1m in diameter, 2m deep.  I’m guessing the loads are worst when the soil is saturated because that’s when latrine pits are collapsing.  Soil here ranges everywhere from very sandy to very clayey.  Note that there should never be the case where the soil has water in it and the pit doesn't.  The pit lining is permeable enough to allow water level to equilibrate.

Any help here appreciated.  Please email me at jchapin -at- ideo.com.  Thanks!

User Research

We had our research presentation and workshop end of last week.  For those interested, I put a pdf of the presentation here.  It’s not fully self-explanatory, but it’ll give you a sense of what we learned and what our perspective is.  I’ll post pics of the workshop in a few days.

Kandal

My last two days of field work were about a week and a half ago in Kandal—a province about a half hour outside Phnom Penh.  All villagers this time.  Three each day.  We tried to reach dry latrine, wet latrine and non-latrine households in order to better understand the motivations of each.  I won’t go into it in much detail now, but did want to share more of my photos to give you a better sense of the people and the environment.

recruiting in the village houses

village kids

non user and his daughter

non user

sample latrine card sort exercise

husband and wife -- dry latrine owners

mother--ideal latrine owner

dry latrine user

her house

her toilet. . . this one was really nasty. . . lots of maggots

One interesting dietary habit we observed was the chewing of betel leaves coated with lamb fat combined with the eating of betel nuts. Done over decades, it makes ones teeth black, super black. I’m not sure how bad it is for dental hygiene, but it can’t be good.  Anyhow, the lady pictured above (and below) was a chewer.  

dental effects of betel leaf chewing

Svay Rieng

Went into the field for the first time two weeks ago.  Drove 3 hours down to Svay Rieng province. Drive was mostly uneventful, though was interrupted by a 20-minute wait to cross a big river. One would normally expect a bridge to get us across the river, but for some reason, this was all done by car ferry.  The number of vendors knocking on the windows to try to sell us stuff while we waited was astounding.  Sopheak bought a pommelo (huge grapefruit), which was absolutely fantastic, and Savath some corn (much less so—way overdone), but nobody ventured far enough to buy the fried crickets.

ferry loading

We arrived in Svay Rieng city (the provincial capital of Svay Rieng province), which was far from overwhelming, around noon and checked into our 5-star hotel which was more like a ½-star hotel.  I definitely miss the IDEO expense budgets. . .   I’ll post my user research report next weekend in which I’ll go through all the detail of what we saw, but for now. . . talked with a number of villagers (dry and wet latrine users & non-users), masons, ring producers and retailers.  We had two groups of us out in the field in parallel, so we covered a lot of ground in three days—15 interviews plus transit time back and forth from Phnom Penh. . . was a bit of data overload. 

Participant recruiting (normally the bane of any researcher) is remarkably simple here.  We just walk around the villages until we see someone with a latrine that looks interesting then go up to their house and ask if they want to talk.  Everyone spends 98% of their time outside, so they’re easy to find.  And everyone has been ridiculously generous with their time, very open to talking about defecation (something with a pretty strong taboo back west) and really funny and enjoyable to interact with.  Physically, the people are amazingly beautiful and have great character, especially the elderly and the children.  My photography doesn’t do them great justice, but here are some of the people we met:

rice farmer

rice farmer

weaver

a man and his latrine

interview observers. . . don't see this normally

interviewing. . .

The interviews mostly last an hour and are almost completely out of my hands.  They happen all in Khmer and for every 5 minutes of talking, I get about 30 seconds of translation.  I’m not getting a lot of the nuance, but I am getting something.  I’m counting on the rest of the team to bring out the nuanced insights during the discussions this week.

Some of the latrines we saw. . .

a nice one. . . pour flush

simple, dry pit latrine

trapless wet latrine

really nice, clay-walled, pseudo-flush latrine

And lastly. . .

weight set at hotel

rooster in a reed cage

CLTS

End of last week I learned about Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS).  It’s a movement that’s swept through the sanitation development sector in the last three or four years.  It emerged in response to the realization that the decades of subsidizing latrine building was not going to solve the sanitation issue.  There wasn’t enough money to build latrines for everyone, and those that were built were often left unused, locked or ended up broken.  People who’d been defecating in the bush for generations weren’t going to completely change their behaviors just because there was now a latrine.  In most cases, the villagers didn’t believe in the need for having a latrine.  If there’s no belief, there will be no behavior change. 

CLTS was pioneered in Bangladesh by Kamal Kar.  If you want to see a video about it, watch this.  It’s pretty interesting.  In short, CLTS is a behavior change model based on generating disgust and shame.  It’s about getting people to come to the realization that they are eating and drinking shit—their own shit and other people’s shit.  Only later in the process is health brought up—in terms of diarrheal illness that the community experiences and health costs related to them.  But primarily, it’s about eating shit.  The language used is coarse--shit, shit, shit.  Embarrassing people is encouraged. 

Interestingly for us, CLTS is repeatedly adamant about not explicitly advocating for the construction of latrines or for specific latrine models—people are supposed to come to the realization on their own that latrines will help them stop eating shit.  People are supposed to come up with their own solutions and designs to building latrines.  Note, however, that CLTS is not completely consistent with this because during a CLTS event, CLTS moderators draw a simple latrine as an example (albeit late in the day during the CLTS event).  And the CLTS training manual mentions that moderators can “share and explain about low and moderate cost latrine options. . . including the sources of their availability. . .”  I think that the CLTS theorists just don’t want to lead the whole effort with latrine designs and latrine advocacy.

Anyhow, CLTS is the big buzz amongst the Cambodian Ministry for Rural Development and the NGOs.  Though it has a few rules, CLTS is mostly open source, so each government and each NGO in each country has freedom to adapt it to more closely match their target populace and their own ideals.  I’m pretty certain the Ministry for Rural Development has made a few changes to the methodology, but I’m still tracking them down.  Not sure how major they are.  One thing I’m fairly certain of is that the resistance of CLTS to advocate for certain latrine designs is leading to some problems in Cambodia.  Amazingly enough, it turns out that if you don’t know how to properly built something, you usually do a pretty crappy job the first time.  And the second time.  And the third time.  Ever tried to build a chair?  How do you think your first one would come out?  

The CLTS insistence that villagers develop their own latrine designs and constructions is, in my opinion, flawed.  Most villagers are building dirt pit dry latrines.  They’re cost-free (minus self-labor) but they’re far from ideal for many reasons that I’ll get to in a later post.  But for now, it’s enough to know that a significant number of the dry pits built as a result of CLTS efforts have been collapsing due to soil instability during the wet season.  The villagers affected are left without proper sanitation for the rest of that wet season and have to redig a new pit the following year.  Often, the pit isn’t redug and the villagers return to open defecation.  When it is redug, it often collapses again the next wet season.  It’s not a sustainable sanitation approach here in Cambodia.  I’m not sure how to marry the IDE technology solutions with the agnosticism of CLTS, but I am sure that it needs to be done.

By wanting a $10-20 initial price-point, are we fighting the CLTS efforts?  How do we say that our $10-20 latrine is the first step when CLTS is saying that a hand-made dry pit is the first step?  Do we need a zero price-point (or $2-$5) design included in our material (i.e., a dry pit design with a dirt pit—maybe lined with local free bamboo—covered with a bamboo and clay slab with a thatch superstructure—cash expenditure only for nails and for a pipe for pit ventilation)?

I also wonder how this might affect the IDE marketing effort.  How closely will IDE work with CLTS?  Will IDE be in the villages at the same time as CLTS folks or shortly after?  When will IDE share its designs and how will that fit in with the CLTS philosophy?  Should IDE’s marketing efforts echo the same coarse language and push some of the same buttons as CLTS (disgust and shame)?  Given our premise of an upgradeable latrine (a stair-step model, if you will), is the first big step about not eating shit?

Kampot

Time for catch up. . . from two weekends ago.  Took a 3-hour bus trip that turned into a 6-hour bus trip (a lot of traffic and a LOT of pee stops for the weak-sphinctered bus populace) to a town called Kampot down near the coast.  Was put in the last row of the bus with 4 Cambodians who spoke a little bit of English and wanted to talk the whole way.  The were pretty entertaining, especially when the old guy sitting next to me decided that he’d rather pee into a little black plastic bag than have the bus stop and pull over.  I don’t think he was too successful, however, because about 30 minutes later, he had the bus stop so he could go outside.  Not sure what happened to the plastic bag. 

the bus stop. . . my bus is 3rd from the right

Saturday afternoon I travelled via tuktuk to two cave temples (Phnom Chhnok being much nicer than Phnom Sorsia) in which Buddhist monks had built brick temples in the 7^th century AD.  They were in remarkably good condition.  I had tons and tons of kids as tour guides—they all want to talk, and I probably waved and said ‘hello’ to about a hundred people as the tuktuk ambled down dirt roads out to the temples.  

on the way to Phnom Chhnok

more scenery

from the hill of Phnom Sorsia

Phnom Chhnok temple

my tour guides and the temple

with my tour guides

along the river in Kampot

Sunday I was going to go up to an old abandoned French hill station (Bokor) but the road up was closed for construction and the hike up takes 6-hours and requires an overnight stay that I didn’t have time for, so I just borrowed a bike and went on a three hour bike ride in the countryside—again, a lot more hellos. . .  then took a shared taxi (a toyota corolla with 5 other passengers—would have been 6  but I paid two fares so I could have the front seat to myself!!).  The driver actually shared his seat with a passenger.

taxi driver talking on his cell phone with a guy sitting to his left sharing his seat. . .

But it was only a 2.5 hour drive, rather than the 6 hour drive, and for only 6 bucks more it was worth it.  Was dropped off at a market in some part of Phnom Penh that I don’t know, so I walked around there for a while, bought some weird fruits, ate some coconut covered grilled bananas, took a moto-taxi back to my hotel, washed my feet and legs off, went for a run amongst thousands of people out for a Sunday night cruise on their motos and about a hundred-fifty dancing the Macarena in a public square !?!   Turns out it’s a quite a common sight, both on weekend nights and early on weekday mornings.  It’s done mostly as exercise.

Observation planning. . .

Tomorrow, we leave for our first three days of observations. We’re going to the Svay Rieng province which is about 3 hours from Phnom Penh. It’s the small Italy-shaped piece of Cambodia that sticks out into Vietnam in the direction of Saigon. We’re going to talk to a handful of villagers as well as masons, concrete ring producers and retailers—these are the main stakeholders in the latrine value chain. If we have time, we’ll also talk with village chiefs, schoolteachers and village- or commune-level health professionals. We’re also going to talk to someone on the province level of the Ministry of Rural Development. If you’re keen to know more about what we’ll be asking, you can find our interview guide here. We’ll use it as a guide for conversations rather than as a survey.

Kickoff

Last Wednesday, we had our project kickoff.  We had about fifteen people from many different organizations:  World Bank Water & Sanitation Program, Ministry of Rural Development (MRD), Future Cambodia Fund, LienAid, GRET, Rainwater Cambodia. . .  Mike (from IDE) gave an intro to the project and the Demand Assessment and Supply Chain work that IDE has already done.  I gave a short intro to IDEO and then we did a few activities.  I had everyone do a braindump on who in Cambodia is doing anything regarding sanitation, with specific emphasis on folks doing stuff related to latrine design.  I’ve since followed up with a number of those people and have had or will have meetings with them to learn what they’re up to. 

We also talked a lot about Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS)—an intensive outreach program originated in Bangladesh that attempts to achieve open defecation free villages purely through education about the positive impact of proper sanitation.  To learn more, check out this video.  They’ve had great success there, and the MRD has had pretty good success here in Cambodia in its first three years of the effort.  CLTS doesn’t advocate for any particular latrine design, and one flaw in the program as experienced by MRD is that the majority of participants tend to build simple dry-pit latrines (a hole in the ground with a wood or bamboo slab over it). These have been collapsing during the wet season due to soil instability, which leaves people without a latrine in the wet season and forces them to redig the pit every dry season—neither of which is good.   Seems that even with the simplest of latrines, some reinforcement of the pit will be required.

We then did a quick brainstorming exercise to draw out everyone’s initial ideas of what the final solution will be.  There were some great ideas that I’m sure will stick with us to the end.

first ideas. . .

Finally, we got commitment from a core team that will work with me more intensely thought the project: Chhoeurn (MRD), Savath (IDE), Satya (IDE), Sopheak (LienAid) and Hengly (Rainwater Cambodia).  None are engineers, none are designers, none are ethnographers!!!  But they are all eager to learn and to work on solving this problem.   Should be fun.

kickoff peeps

more kickoff peeps

the teams

Market day. . .

Thought some of you might enjoy these photos from a market I went to on Sunday.  Was in one of the neighborhoods of Phnom Penh and, from the looks I was getting, not often frequented by westerners.  The market sold pretty much everything—meat, fish, fruit, veggies, clothes, watches, jewelry, packaged foods, grains, housewares (bowls, cups, etc), soaps and detergents, shoes. . . you name it.  In the humid, hot day, the smells were intense.  And in the fish/butcher area, I was regretting wearing sandals. . .

melting down gold in a ceramic shard crucible

many kinds of eggs. . . not sure what the black ones were, but they were coated with some substance that looked like really nice potting soil

egg lady

incense

squid

intestine

little fish

bigger fish

sausage (each the size of a malted milk ball)

banana alley