I'll be at the Global Health Council Conference

(From the conference program for the Global Health Council's annual conference, which takes place May 27-31 in Washington, DC More info at the Council's website, www.globalhealth.org.)

Brown-Bag Session: Finding Work in Global Health
Friday, May 30, 2008
12:45-1:45 pm
Capitol Room

Considering a global health career, a part-time internship, or simply a volunteer stint overseas? You won't want to miss this brown-bag workshop. Patricia Ohmans, MPH, co-author of the book Finding Work in Global Health, will offer an insider’s guide to entering the field. Her lively, interactive presentation will cover the 10 top myths about global health; seven ways to work in the field; a dozen questions to ask yourself BEFORE you go, and more. This session is designed especially for entry-level professionals, but NGO recruiters are cordially invited to participate.

In Praise of Plumbing

Tony’s mother Dolores Pink, who was born in 1925, used to say that the greatest invention she experienced in her lifetime was the installation of indoor plumbing in her family’s home in Shakopee, Minnesota.

After nearly nine months of our sabbatical in Bolivia, we know whereof she spoke. We’ve become major fans of toilet paper, a sink with running water, flush toilets, and hand soap, none of which are a given in Bolivian bathrooms, even those in otherwise hygenic settings, like a middle class restaurant, the US-style grocery store, or a landscaped gas station.

It appears that in Bolivia, nobody wants to think about shit, literally. Last week, I visited a squatter’s settlement in which a German foundation has spent millions of euros in the past five years building a lovely nursery school and day care center, a primary school, a high school, athletic fields, a medical clinic and a dental office. The school bathroom was, as usual, awash in spilled water and unflushed toilet paper. If it had been flushed, it would have gone...pretty much nowhere, as the settlement is built on granite-hard soil.

The community had some paved roads, pipes laid for the running water that was coming soon, and they were getting electricity that weekend. When I asked about sewerage pipes, the foundation’s operating manager, a lovely and intelligent young woman, looked amused. “Maybe in 2010,” she mused, half to herself. Where do individuals in this community of 5,000 souls relieve themselves? “Down there,” she said, waving vaguely at an alley we were passing. “Behind their houses. Up in the hills somewhere.”

It’s just as much of a problem downtown, where the few public baños charge users a boliviano for the privilege (and a couple squares of pink papel higenico.) I’ve seen little children pooping on newspaper and throwing it in a sidewalk dumpster, and older women squatting at the curb, skirts hitched up.

I’ve done the equivalent on long bus rides, when the driver stops at a stretch of roadside and everyone gets out and wanders off in what they hope will be an invisible direction. It’s a rare Bolivian bus whose bathroom is unlocked, and if you ask the driver’s assistant to unlock it he may do so, but only after warning you sternly to “solamente orinar!” Hard orders to follow, at times.

I brought a suitcase full of books down with me to Cochabamba, but the only book that I’ve read more than once is a slim manual called Sanitation and Cleanliness for a Healthy Environment, published by the Hesperian Foundation, the folks that produce Where There Is No Doctor. It’s got chapter headings like “Diarrhea and Dehydration,” ; “2-Pit Compost Toilet” and “Pour-flush Pit Toilet”. Increasingly, that book looks like a how-to for healthier life in Bolivia. I keep it in our bathroom.