We can rebuild her. We have the technology.
I salute a man and a dog.
I have met many extremely courageous people. Maggie Barankitse, who set up an orphanage for both Tutsi and Hutu children after the war in Burundi and the genocide in Rwanda, and refused to distinguish between them: she called them “HutsiTwa.” (I didn’t realise until I looked her up that she is now in exile.) Sister Barbara Brilliant, the dean of Mother Patern college in Liberia, an indefatigable and frankly quite terrifying (when you do something wrong, as I did) nun who stayed in Liberia all through its 30 years of conflict, tending and protecting and helping. There are many others and now I think about it, many are religious. I am not but I see that religion or faith is a powerful fuel to drive an engine.
This week is a eulogy for Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, who has died aged 80. I met Dr. Pathak a couple of times for sanitation purposes: he founded the organisation Sulabh International, which has installed millions of toilets and thousands of public toilets across India. If you have travelled through India by train, you will certainly have gone to a Sulabh. Actually I found Dr. Pathak to be a little odd. His English was difficult to understand (and my Hindi atrocious), and his manner vague and dreamy. But he was kind and hospitable, and his story was vivid and extremely impressive. He was a Brahmin, and yet he spent his life trying to make untouchables touchable and employable. This was a huge thing in India, where the hideous caste system still operates, and where untouchability — outlawed 50 years ago — is still thriving. Not when it comes to rape. You can touch an untouchable woman then, no bother.
From The Big Necessity:
In 1969, the idealistic young Pathak began to volunteer with the Gandhian Centenary Committee in his home state of Bihar. The committee’s job was to organize three years of programmes and celebrations in honour of their hero’s birth. Their hero cared about scavengers, so the volunteers were supposed to do the same. For a young man from an Orthodox Brahmin family, this was unthinkable.
In his spacious office at Sulabh headquarters, Pathak, now sixty- four, tells a family anecdote. ‘When I was a child, I wanted to know why some people were untouchable. I wanted to see what would happen if I touched one, so I did.’ His grandmother made him eat cow dung and sand, drink cow urine, then take a ritual bath. How can dung be clean? Purity rituals that seem to defy sense are common to many cultures: Ancient Mesopotamians carried dung around their necks to ward off evil; Hindus have decided that cow dung is holy. Such classifications of what is dirty and what is pure are obviously not about reality. Investing dirt with power makes it more manage- able. Making people defilingly dirty makes them more manageable, too. They can be kept in their place. Even so, writes Virginia Smith in Clean, her history of hygiene, ‘Distancing yourself from poisons, dust and dirt is one thing but distancing yourself from invisibly “unclean” people and objects is quite an achievement of the imagination.’ It was a leap of imagination that Pathak refused to make.
Instead, a few years later, he risked more cow punishment by going to live with scavengers. There, he found both outrage and a vocation. He couldn’t believe people lived in such conditions. The state of Bihar had for years been running a latrine-building programme state-wide in an attempt to remove the dry latrines that scavengers had to clean. Yet the women carrying headloads of excrement were still there. ‘Scavengers’ appalling hardship, humiliation and exploitation,’ Pathak wrote, ‘have no parallel in human history. [...It is] the utmost violation of human rights.’
These “pavement-dwellers,” which means exactly that, have an affordable subscription service that lets them use Sulabh toilets and wash facilities, and when you live on a pavement amongst Delhi traffic, that must feel like heaven.
Dr. Pathak also had the idea of setting up the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets at the Sulabh campus outside Delhi on the way to the airport.
In 1994, Pathak realized that maybe not everybody shared his delight in pour-flush privies and the transformation of scavengers to snack-sellers and cleaners. He decided to ‘make toilets interesting’. During a visit to London’s Madame Tussauds, he got an idea. Why not build a museum of toilets? Letters were dispatched to all foreign embassies in Delhi, asking for information about their country’s toilet habits. The British provided a small booklet on the work of Mr Thomas Crapper. The Counsellor for Scientific and Technological Affairs at the US embassy could offer only the address of the American Society of Sanitary Engineering, and the suggestion that Sulabh’s idea of playing the national anthem of various nations as one approaches their toilet in the exhibit might be ‘something that many people might object to. A simple sign explaining the exhibit may be less controversial.’
Pathak gathered the exhibits on his global travels. The collection is impressive, but it still fits easily into a single room on the campus, next door to the biogas research lab. Replicas of historically relevant commodes, toilets and latrines are placed alongside a microwave toilet – used in ships – and a portable privy aimed at campers. There is a French commode disguised as English books, including a Shakespeare play. ‘The French always used English titles for books,’ says my guide, as if he can’t imagine why.
All this served to make toilets not unspeakable and therefore people who emptied latrines — the job of untouchables — not untouchable or unspeakable either. Dr. Pathak did good.
Thank you, Dr. Pathak, and rest in peace.
His obituaries in the Guardian and the Economist.
Odds and sods
This piece on myopia and the frankly astonishing solution to it, by Amit Katwala, blew my mind. It has everything: excellent reporting, a subject you probably never thought about, and a plot finale that is 100% satisfying.
My friend Michelle Tenwick swam the English Channel today. I am genuinely in awe. Here she is, solo Channel swimmer, as she started at 3am:
And how she finished, 11 hours and 13 minutes later. Video still courtesy of Tim Denyer; pic by Patrice Chassery.
Something I dream of doing, RIGHT NOW.
Animal hero of the week: Kabang
Kabang was a street dog in the Philippines who was adopted by a man named Rudy Bunggal. She was a shepherd mix. In 2011, Rudy’s daughter Dina and her cousin Princess Diansine (applause for that name) wanted to cross a busy road in Zamboanga City. They didn’t see a motorcycle coming towards them, but Kabang did, and she leapt out into the road and jumped at the motorbike, knocking it over. She saved the girls, but was horribly injured. Her face was embedded in the front wheel. “The bones holding her upper snout were crushed, and we could not do anything to save it,” said Rudy. “We just pulled her off the wheel”. Rudy refused to have her killed. She survived without a snout, and even got pregnant (go, Kabang!). She was famous. “She has become a superstar,” said Rudy. “People come here to have their photos taken with the dog. Some came with medicines and vitamins."
But after her wound got infected, a US nurse saw her story online (she had become famous in the Philippines for her bravery), fundraised, and Kabang was sent to UC Davis William R. Pritchard Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital.
There she was found to have heartworms.
[Slight digression because WTF are heartworms? Thanks Wikipedia:
Dirofilaria immitis, also known as heartworm or dog heartworm, is a parasitic roundworm that is a type of filarial worm, a small thread-like worm, that causes dirofilariasis. It is spread from host to host through the bites of mosquitoes. There are four genera of mosquitoes that transmit dirofilariasis, Aedes, Culex, Anopheles, and Mansonia. The definitive host is the dog, but it can also infect cats, wolves, coyotes, jackals, foxes, ferrets, bears, seals, sea lions and, under rare circumstances, humans.]
Kabang also had cancer. Get the full Monty, why don’t you, Kabang? The worms were treated with antibiotics; the cancer with chemotherapy. Then she had five hours of surgery during which her snout was rebuilt (does anyone else think of the Six Million Dollar Man when the word “rebuild” is used in a surgical context? We can rebuild him. We have the technology). The treatments cost $27,000 and were funded by people in 47 different countries.
Here is Kabang on the BBC, fixed. (She doesn’t look that fixed, but she got a new nose. And a green dog with a Santa hat.)
Kabang died in 2021 in her sleep. She was 13. Nobody stuffed her. Good dog.