Day 70: Nowhere to go – The Weight of My Days

I’m thirsty. But I can’t drink water, because then I’ll have to urinate. And there’s nowhere nearby to do that.

I’m on my period. So I can’t go to school, because there’s no safe bathroom to go and change the pad.

I went outside at night to urinate because there’s no toilet in our house. I was raped and murdered.

I have three toilets in my house. They all work. I complain because I’ve had to have them fixed a couple times in eight years and I got ripped off when I had the septic tank cleaned once.

Then I read an article about toilets in the rest of the world.

I’ve traveled and worked in lots of countries where sanitation was poor, but still the statistics shocked me: 2.5 billion people do not have clean, private toilets.

Women and girls in particular risk their health, drop out of school, or become victims of violent crime because they don’t have a toilet.

There’s an even bigger safety issue: Communities without clean sanitation systems end up with fecal-contaminated water. Kids drink the water and die from diarrheal diseases.