What’s life like without a toilet (and what you can do to help)

Using an unstable toilet, borrowing a bathroom, or urinating in a bucket. These are some of the habits of Argentina’s more than 6 million people who don’t have a bathroom. Worldwide, this reality affects nearly half of the population. To make this issue even more visible, the United Nations designated November 19 as World Toilet Day.

According to Health Module, around 1,000 children under the age of five die every day around the world due to lack of water, sanitation and hygiene. In the past eight years, this social organization has built 1,200 bathrooms in nine provinces of our country.

Marianela, whose family received a new bathroom because of her job, lives in the town of Moreno in Buenos Aires and uses a wooden toilet as a bathroom without a connection to water or sanitation. “It has a small structure with the toilet located above the well. My 4 year old son has chronic pneumonia and I have no choice but to bathe them there. Besides the cold, I am terrified every time I have to go out to use the toilet ,”He said.

Lack of toilets affects health, overall human development and its possibilities. The situation is even more serious for women and girls, as leaving home to go to the bathroom or use unstable buildings exposes them to the possibility of infection, as well as the possibility of espionage, insecurity, harassment and even abuse. “I was afraid to go out at night, so we kept it in a bucket next to the bed,” Mariana recalls.

One of the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to ensure access to safe sanitation. Along these lines, the UN’s diagnosis is alarming: To achieve this, it says, the world must work five times faster on average. “

In addition to building bathrooms, the health module also promotes hygiene measures through recreational workshops in disadvantaged communities. In November, the group tried to highlight the issue with the slogan “Buckets are not bathrooms.”

If you would like to make a monthly or one-time donation to the Wellness Module, you can enter here.

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If you are interested in this topic, I recommend the following notes:

How to work to alleviate the health crisis of 6 million Argentines without bathrooms in their homes

‘A hot bath when it’s cold outside is priceless’: How this affects first-time bathing families and what you can do to help