118 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • AUGUST 2017
(OL]DEHWK5R\WH has written books on trash and water,
and her last article for National Geographic was on
food waste. Andrea Bruce focuses on people living
in the aftermath of war; she photographed Damascus
for the March 2014 issue.
number that are actually used, consistently, by
every family member.
EARLY ONE MORNING IN A VILLAGE north of
Bhopal, more than a hundred people gather in
an open area, where Santoshi Tiwari, a sharp-
tongued field-worker with Samarthan, a region-
al nonprofit, tells them to sit down, close their
mouths, and listen. First she asks what they’re
proudest of in their village. The temple, they
say. And what gives them the most shame? The
human waste along the roads.
Like a Pied Piper, Tiwari then leads the villag-
ers past their temple and into a recently plowed
field, where she suddenly halts. “What is this?”
she demands, pointing toward the ground.
A few wags ofer variants on the technical term.
Tiwari asks if the excrement can be identified—by
man, woman, child, or caste. “It’s from the low-
er caste,” a woman says, “because this is a lower
caste area.” Tiwari moves on: How many peo-
ple live here? About 1,500, a young man shouts.
Tiwari explains that each person daily produces
more than half a pound of feces, which means
the village annually produces around 300,000
pounds. The crowd murmurs, and Tiwari leads
them in a round of mocking applause.
Now she turns serious. She explains how feces
circulate through the village on the legs of flies,
in water, and in dust. She opens a bottle of wa-
ter, pours some into a plastic cup, and sips. Then
she plucks a long hair from her head, draws it
through the pile at her feet, and swirls the filthy
strand in her water cup. The crowd steps back-
ward; their faces contort with disgust. “Would
you drink this water?” Tiwari asks, profering
the cup. “This is just one hair,” she adds. “Flies
have six legs.”
Triggering disgust—by mapping and quanti-
fying feces and dipping tainted hairs in drinking
water—is the hallmark of “community-led total
sanitation,” an approach that has been credit-
ed with reducing open defecation in places not
plagued by caste division. Today’s gathering is
an opening salvo: Sensing commitment, Tiwari
promises to return to help residents navigate the
paperwork for the government subsidy, purchase
bricks, and train masons to build pits. Settling
who will empty them is beyond her brief, as is
what happens to the sludge—a long-standing
problem India scarcely has begun to address. But
even if the sludge is merely dumped in some far-
of ditch, it poses less of a health threat than in-
dividual piles of feces on nearby roads and fields.
Samarthan and other aid groups promote
twin-pit latrines and the harmless fertilizer they