Alarm as quake buries toilet triumph

Children run through rubble in Bungamati on the outskirts of
Kathmandu on Sunday. (AFP)

GARDINER HARRIS, TT,Pauwathok, Nepal, May 10: After years of intense effort, officials here in rural Sindhupalchowk district had persuaded almost all of the nearly 61,000 households to each build a toilet. Then the quake struck, destroying most houses - and the very toilets that could have helped stave off the diseases that can run rampant after natural disasters.

Now, instead of celebrating a public health triumph, residents are holding services for their dead and digging through the rubble to find more bodies. And relief workers are pouring into the district, hoping to salvage the remarkable progress in improving hygiene made here in recent years.

"There will be outbreaks of cholera and other diseases," said Antti Rautavaara, chief of water, sanitation and hygiene for Unicef in Nepal. "It is a battle we cannot win. We can only try to minimise the pain and death."

Two weeks have passed since a magnitude 7.9 earthquake devastated large swaths of this mountainous country, killing more than 7,900 people and injuring more than 17,000. Nepal's government and charitable organisations are racing to beat monsoon season, which begins in about six weeks, to get tents and food to as many as 800,000 Nepalis whose homes are uninhabitable. But they say an equally urgent task is to provide clean water and toilets before the rains make the poor sanitary environment in these devastated areas far worse by carrying contamination into water supplies and making direct contact with fecal bacteria almost inevitable.

Small outbreaks of diarrhoea have been reported across Nepal since the earthquake, and although such outbreaks are routine here, they have raised worries that the quake's aftermath is at least partly to blame.

About every fourth house in Chautara, among the district's largest villages, is rubble.

A sign still standing at one end of town declares: "To Defecate In Open Areas Is To Commit A Crime." But in interviews, many residents said the destruction had forced them to return to that now-criminalised practice.

Chameli Giri, 45, is one. Standing on a pile of rubble and wood that was once her house in the nearby village of Pauwathok, an eye-watering stench from the family's crushed goats rising around her, Giri made it clear that her worries were more immediate. She and her seven children were all living in a jury-rigged lean-to next to the family's surviving livestock; the night before, she had heard a tiger. She feared thieves.

For the moment, she said gesturing toward the hillside, the family would have to make do with the outdoors. "What else can we do?" she said.