August 2008
Issue No. 414
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We need to talk about... toilets
2008 is the International Year of Sanitation. Or, asks Maggie Black, is it the International Year of Silence and Embarrassment?
Toilets - The Facts
Everything you ever wanted to know about toilets.
A lifetime in muck
Unbelievably, people still exist whose task in life is shovelling shit, as Mari Marcel Thekaekara explains.
To Sewer or Not to Sewer
David Satterthwaite speaks out in praise of sewers, and Mayling Simpson-Hébert retaliates on behalf of pits.
For our convenience
Toilets have been around since the days of Elizabeth I. Systems old and new.
Dignity and the decent facility
Women desperately want toilets – but not as a health aid. Libby Plumb reports.
Stand up, stand up for toilets...
Toilet champions are not so rare a breed as you’d think. Here are some distinguished exemplars.
News, views, and & voices
NI Special feature
Technofixes: climate solution or corporate scam?
Science is coming up with ever more extraordinary proposals for combating climate change, from laying white plastic over deserts to locking up carbon dioxide in the oceans or shooting it into space. Should we take any of this seriously?
Currents
Jail babies
Children imprisoned with their mothers worldwide
Rights for albinos
Tanzanian authorities launch a crackdown on anti-albino witch doctors
Getting fair treatment
Brazil’s AIDS fight against Big Pharma continues
Tortured for 'refusing to kill'
A conscientious objector from Istanbul was beaten with sticks until he passed out
The drugs don't work
Why young rural Indians end up addicted to pills
Eau de victory
Water privatization heads back to public management around the world
Word power
The language of the car...
by Mitchell & Richardson
Speechmarks
Nelson Mandela (1918- )
Powerful words from South Africa’s first black President
Seriously
Mandela’s no tourist
Nelson Mandela gets a birthday present from the US, being repealed from the Terror Watch List!
Big Bad World
Big Bad World 414
Polyp's take on happiness
Worldbeaters
Thabo Mbeki
President of South Africa (though not for much longer).
View from...
The Eighth Commandment – Lies
Lies, food & the poor by Eduardo Galeano
Mixed media - Film
Letter to Anna: the Story of Journalist Politkovskaya’s Death
The story of one journalist who tirelessly exposed its horrors and manipulation by the Moscow political class.
Kids and money
The horrors of the attitudes towards money of Los Angeles 12-16-year-olds
An island calling
An explosive mix of politics, religion and sexuality explored through the life of a gay couple in Fiji
My life inside
A masterful piece of film-making that leaves the audience gasping at the injustice of a 99 year sentence for a Mexican 'illegal' migrant following the death of the child she was minding
Mixed media - Books
Body Shopping: The Economy Fuelled by Flesh and Blood
Donna Dickensen’s fascinating overview of the complex world of medical ethics
The Hangman's Game
Karen King-Aribisala's debut novel, a dark and brooding meditation on the stories we tell and the effect they have on everyday life
Mixed media - Music
Virtual Leisure
The début album from the Israeli-born, London-based performance artist Anat Ben-David, is based on a grim paradox, leisure doesn’t exist – it’s virtual
Maldito Tango
This collection of prowling, lunfardo slang-inflected songs concentrates on an imagined lowlife of Buenos Aires.
Making waves
Teófilo Acuña
Colombian activist Teófilo Acuña on the danger of confronting paramilitaries.
Southern exposure
River Bleeds Black
Bangladeshi photographer Shehzad Noorani exposes the damage done to the Buriganga River.
Country profile
Dominica
Dominica is a small island both in population and size. Yet the island feels a lot bigger than this, with dozens of mountain peaks, waterfalls and some say a river for every day of the year.
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from
THIS MONTH'S EDITOR
The problem with toilets is that no-one wants to talk about them. Even less do they want to talk about what goes into them (the ‘s’ word) or the act of human waste expulsion (the ‘d’ word) - except with smirks and giggles.
That kind of verbal crap has been swilling remorselessly around the NI editorial offices in Oxford this month. Why do Brits (maybe it’s only the male of the species) take such delight in lavatorial double entendres? Swedes can talk about excremental effluvia and pee-H content without the least hilarity issuing from their lips.
Ballcocks aside, this is a serious subject. Imagine what it is like not to have a decent place to ‘go’. It is not surprising that people don’t want to talk about the indignity they suffer - although some women do so in these pages.
The hidden scandal is that this is a situation endured by literally millions of people. Addressing the scandal demands as a first requirement that we learn to talk about it without embarrassment.
So it’s back to language and staying within the bounds of what you, the readers, daily defecators as we all are, regard as good taste. I hope to succeed in opening the door - or should it be the lid? - and inviting you in.
Maggie Black for the
New Internationalist Co-operative
