World Toilet Day Post Script

So where was I on World Toilet Day?

On my hands and knees in our rental property filling up a hole.

I was preparing to decorate the smallest room in the house following a repair there to the floor, when I discovered another hole in the wall (you will recall my bad hair day when this happened in the kitchen). Once again it was the result of a bathroom leak that the last tenants had seemingly failed to notice. So fittingly I spent most of the afternoon next to the loo re-rendering part of the wall ready for a plaster finish. Oh the joys of owning an old property 120 miles distant.

Whilst I was waiting for it to dry, I had a catch-up online and was pleased to see that one of my fellow retirement bloggers, Maddie in Australia, did a special entry on her blog to mark the Day and which you can find here.

World Toilet Day 2016

Today is World Toilet Day, which seeks to raise awareness and motivate action towards meeting the Sustainable Development goal to ensure that everywhere has access to toilets by 2030.

Did you know that one in ten people in the world today still has to defecate in the open? The video above was made for World Toilet Day in 2013 on this point.

Hats off therefore to 105 year old Kunwar Bai Yadav who sold her goats in order to pay for a toilet for her village in the Indian state of  Dhamtari. It was only a year before that she had even heard about toilets after spending over a century visiting the woods in order to defecate. As a result fellow villagers have now built toilets too on the basis that if Kunwar Bai Yadav could do it they could too. India's aim is to eliminate open defecation by 2nd October 2019.

 

 

Even where there is access to a toilet, poor sanitation can spread diseases.This is the World Toilet Day 2016 video made to illustrate that fact. It is estimated that globally 17% of workplace deaths are attributable to disease transmission at work, mostly caused by poor hygiene or sanitation.

"Toilets save lives, increase productivity, create jobs and grow economies. Toilets work." (Toast to Toilets by the World Toilet Day Administrative Team.)

In a Land of Invention and Cleanliness

Whilst in the USA as one might imagine I had to use the restrooms (well we were there a month). 

It seemed that for the first three weeks of our trip all moving parts were automated: the flush, soap, taps and dryer or hand towel dispenser. I guess it's a partial advance towards complete sanitisation although someone evidently forgot that we still have to touch the door handles. It also leads to a dread of shuffling during a performance, just in case the flushing starts prematurely and don't start me off on the hand flapping that goes on in an effort to trigger a trickle of soap or even water. It all gets dreadfully complicated especially when you fail to realise that you are actually waving at a bolt on the splashback rather than the magic eye itself.

In any event I had just got the hang of distinguishing sensors from nuts, bolts and blemishes when we landed in California and a much more laid back approach sent us back to a land of pressing, pushing and twisting. Regrettably I repeatedly found myself mechanically moving first one then both hands to and fro in the forlorn expecation that a conventional tap might suddenly produce a stream of water. Oh well at least it provided me with amusement; there is after all nothing better than laughing at one's own inadequacies (again and again, because some people just don't learn).

I must however praise the Americans for not only providing copious numbers of restrooms (their description, not mine) but also without charge and with only rare exception generally of the cleanest standard. I also congratulate their innovation in the field of automation  and where those conveniences found on garage forecourts in the UK may not be the most inviting I could not resist snapping this wash basin found at a service area in South Carolina. Note how spotless and polished it is.

The item on the right of the synthetic resin basin is not a baby changing mat but instead an ultra violet hand dryer. As you can imagine I had copious fun with that, working out firstly what it was and then secondly how to operate it.