Mountains of a different kind

Tracy Kidder‘s widely read documentary book about Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti is called Mountains beyond Mountains. The title comes from a Haitian proverb which is translated into English as: “Beyond the mountains, more mountains.” In other words, every challenge is followed by another.

Have you by any chance read Rose George‘s book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters? If not, I highly recommend it. It will take you where no book (that I know of) has gone before. It’s about human excrement.

In following the excrement, George will guide you through the sewers of London to open defecation in rural India to the biogas revolution in villages of China: all places and situations that are quite “normal.”

Perhaps, in an updated edition, she will add a chapter on the “big necessity” in crisis situations. What happens, for example, when over a million people are displaced from their residences and are forced to survive in “tent camps?”

One things that happens is mountains beyond mountains of excrement. An article in the New York Times points to the sanitation situation and its implications for disease. Not to mention everyday misery and degradation.

The article, however, provides a ray of hope. Viva Rio, a Brazilian nongovernmental group, has launched an operation in one slum area of Port-au-Prince that turns human excrement into biogas that can be used for cooking and electricity.

This project should be replicated throughout the camps, throughout the island: turn the mountains beyond mountains of excrement into something people can use. Thank you, Viva Rio.

Image: Creative commons licensed Flickr content by BBC World Service. Feb. 9, 2010. From Haiti. “There aren’t many latrines, so this is pretty much the only way to dispose of all types of waste – dig a big hole and stick it in the ground.”