featuring GATHER, on world sanitation
If you asked my husband the names of my Transylvanian cousins, aunts and uncles, he would struggle to give you the right answer. He would be much better able to tell you which household owned a TV, who had the first refrigerator, the first toilet, or who was the first to have electricity installed.
It all has something to do with the first time he met Grandma. That summer in Romania was very hot. Grandma’s garden was always cool, especially under the shade of the grape vine, where she kept the outdoor table.
Pawel told me he had spotted the walnut cakes and the coffee as soon as we arrived. They were laid on the table under the vine. The coffee, in an enamel kettle, charcoal-black and steaming hot. The walnut cakes were Grandma’s speciality, she called them ‘the lady’s caprice’, and I have never been able to recreate them at home.
Before we could have coffee, Grandma invited us into the house. Past the sweltering hot veranda, into the guest room. There, she took two photo albums from the bookcase. One covered in crimson velvet, and one with wooden covers.
Grandma first opened one of the albums, and a sea of black and white daguerreotype images appeared. She slowly pointed to each picture, talking us through them. There were pictures of her mother, and Grandpa’s mother. Also, of both their fathers – my great-grandparents.
‘I placed both our fathers’ pictures on the same page, as they both died young, in the war’, she said. She then showed us pictures of her cousins and mentioned they had been very ‘rich’: they had owned an indoor toilet and a refrigerator, both in the 60s. Her other cousin had even had a gramophone.
She turned the pages, and we got to know more and more members of her family, as well as her many siblings. About each of them, we consistently found out whether they had owned a fridge, a toilet, electricity.
Eventually she got to newer photographs, pictures of her own house, the garden, and her children.
I remember noticing a bath in the middle of the garden in one of the photos. We asked her if she kept it there for the children to play in in the summer.
‘Oh no‘, she answered, ‘that just was how we washed them in the summer months. Did you not know that your mother never had an indoor toilet whilst living at home? We had a toilet built in the house, and a bath, in 1978. She was at university by then. Do you know when we got our first refrigerator? A FRAM. In 1968. And our first black and white television, in 1970. Your mother-in-law, my daughter’ –she addressed Pawel – ‘bought us our first colour TV in 1989‘.
The coffee on the outside table, under the vine, had gotten cold in the process, to Pawel’s utter disbelief and slight discontent, since he is rather not a cold coffee drinker.
GATHER
This week I am featuring Gather. What the story above does not relinquish is that my Grandmother never really accepted the inside toilet as a usual convenience. She would use the outdoors one exclusively in the summer months, and kept the indoors toilet as a great luxury during the biting cold of winter, when temperatures could drop well beyond zero and when having to walk out at night in slippers to the far end of the garden, by the chickens and the turkey could indeed be tricky for an older woman.
And yet such luxury is still denied in other parts of the world. I mean, the actual luxury of having a working toilet, be that inside, or out.
And here is where Gather, future leader in world sanitation, come in.
Gather was born when Lindsey Noakes and her business partner John Peter Archer became aware that despite an extraordinary need for toilets to be built in places with no sanitation, and despite many organisations’ willingness to building those toilets, a lack of cohesive data meant that the toilets were still being built away from the areas that needed it the most. So Lindsey and John decided to set up an impartial charity which would gather and coordinate data on where the worst urban sanitation existed and make it available for those who built the toilets.
This is what Lindsey said, during an interview which will soon be published on Storisse: ‘There are a lot of organisations who want to do good, so we wondered what was holding them back. The issue was the lack of clarity in the data.’
‘What was extraordinary was that we noticed a clustering of toilets, so a lot of toilets in one area, generally by a large development, like a shopping mall, whilst there would be none in an adjacent area. Such inequity of investment has real repercussions on any other interventions. Toilets have an impact on everything. They keep children in education, prevent disease, increase productivity and keep cities clean. ‘
Gather provides a map of existing toilets, so that charities who want to intervene and resolve the sanitation problem can do so in the most effective way possible.
This charity was started from two extraordinary people’s sheer belief in fairness and conviction they could make a real difference. I find this so inspiring. Do you know of other such ventures? Why not drop me a few words underneath.
I do not know how I managed to write about Grandma yet again. I guess her bag of stories is still quite full. If you would like to get to know her better, here is where you can find out more about her. She was an extraordinary woman.