Now I can even read magazines in the toilet: Virginia’s World Toilet Day Reflections
About six years ago, I was overjoyed when I heard that one of our an early customer of home toilets in Madagascar home services had given this testimonial: “Now I can even read magazines in the toilet.” We had given her a place to think.
Around the same time was one of the most terrifying toilet sightings of my life. It was also in Madagascar, when we visited an informal settlement on a low-lying patch of land with a high water table. We watched our step on a rickety boardwalk over the mudflat, when someone pointed out a structure hardly recognisable as a toilet. Boxed in by a few planks of rotten wood was a mound of faeces and rubbish. A few inches above the mound, a couple more rotten planks comprised a “floor” with a gap, which for people in the houses stood next to us, their toilet. Suddenly I saw something move in the gap. It looked like a giant pallid worm, until I realised it was a tail, its owner a large rat, ready to greet the next visitor.
For around 30% of the global population, the toilet is almost always a place of privacy, peace and relief. But what happens when children grow up with terrifying toilets? And what happens when teenagers, adults, parents and the elderly live day in day out where the toilet is a place of fear and indignity, one you’ll need to walk to at night and share with strangers? Beyond the dismal impracticalities, what does it mean for someone’s self-worth?
This is what I sometimes think about on the toilet, especially on more vulnerable days (for instance, if I have a bad tummy, or my period). I feel blessed to have this refuge until I remember how many people don’t.
Perhaps sometimes we could engage with some shame while we do our business and flush it away with potable water, in a world of where basic sanitation inequity carries on for billions, mostly unchecked.
In 2016 a sculpture called America by Maurizio Cattelan, a conceptual artist, was installed at the Guggenheim museum in New York. America was simply a traditional flush toilet in solid gold. The sculpture symbolised base entitlement, or just hubris.
In 2017, when Donald Trump first entered the White House, his administration (following tradition) requested to borrow a Van Gogh painting from the Guggenheim for the Oval Office. The curator, Nancy Spector, instead offered him America, and a letter that was later published in the Washington Post. (The Washington Post is now protected by a paywall, but you can find a bit about Spector’s letter here.
Today in America, about a quarter people live without sewered toilets. In some places, like Alabama, the unfeasibility of septic tanks and the lack of safe sanitation has been closely linked with racial injustice, as beautifully articulated in Catherine Coleman Flowers’ 2020 book, Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret.
In 2019, America the sculpture was on loan for an exhibition in the UK at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England (the birthplace of Winston Churchill), where it was handily stolen and never recovered. It was 100kg of solid gold, but the thieves prised it out of the building and later melted it down to gold bullion.
Where does this reflection leave us at Loowatt? Toilets are everywhere, steeped in everyday life, culture, and relation to resources. They are the fodder of so much metaphor, and so many jokes.
We must simply forge ahead to deliver hygienic, dignified and sustainable sanitation, and work to drive a global shift to where toilet can be a safe refuge for everyone.
Go to our World Toilet Day 2025 Hub where we explore innovation, ideas and developments in the sanitation sector.
