The Toilet Museum

It's day two in India and I am still in love with this place. It has finally suck in that I am in India and my excitement at being here has only intensified with each passing hour. Perhaps my favorite experience has been the Toilet Musium. When I first heard that we we're going to this museum, I secretly rolled my eyes thinking that this absurd idea was not going to be very fun or interesting. However, I soon realized how wrong I was in thingking that this adventure was going to be a boring experience. This realization first came when we were immediately invited to join in a non-religious prayer that was " a great way to start the morning." The man, Dr. Brindeshwar Pathak, who invited us to prayer is the founder of this museum. He explained that those who clean up human excrement in India were part of the cast system that were known as untouchables. While the caste system does not exist anymore, a social order that continues to segregate prople to a lesser degree isstill in place today. Dr. Pathak's desire is to continue Gandi's dream of equality in society as wellas care for the environment. By creating an excrement disposal system that does not involve human contact with feacies, Dr. Pathak believe that those who belong to this social order will be able to rise above the class they were borne into and be able to choose their own occupation. There are many reasons I admire Dr. Pathak and his Salabh Sanitation Movement. The fist is that he has followed through on his inspiration from history. Dr. Pathak has taken his ideologies from Gahdni. He has not set out todo something new, but has taken the social action of the past and molded it to the needs of today. The second reason I like what Dr. Pathak is doing is because his work is very holistic. In this sanitation movement, he addresses environmental issues that arise through the unsanitary disposal of human excrement as well as the social needs of those belonging to this low class. If the original system of waist disposal performened by this class was changed in such a way that they were no longer needed, this would create job loss and deprive these unskilled, uneducated people of their only source of income. Dr. Pathak has wisely foreseen this problem and so has created a school for the children of these untouchables to creat a generation of educated people, has created a literacy class for their parents to allow them thrive in a world where literacy is so importnat, and has created vocational training for girls and women who no longer want to work as poop scoopers (a vulga but appropriate definition of their role in society). In our Western culture, excrement is an uncomfortable topic to discuss. Once it is in the toilet, we simply push down on a handle and never have to worry about it ever again. People in India also never had to worry about the disposal of their excrement because the the untouchables took care of it for them. While we easily see that handling excrement is a job that no one should have, it has taken years of people in India to come to this same conclusion. I wonder in what areas of our society are we also blind to social inequality because someone else must handle out putrid waste and we never have to think about it. I hope that India will open my eyes so that I can see social injustice that was once hidden from me. ----Emily Scott----