Daqui: http://support.waterforpeople.org/site/Ecard?ecard_id=1262
Faz hoje exactamente uma semana, no 19 de Novembro, celebrou-se o Dia Mundial da Retrete sob o auspício da ONG internacional – WaterAid. Absorvida que estive com as festividades dos 2 anos do Benjamim, não assinalei aqui esse dia para mim tão querido e que tão de perto me toca. Faço-o agora. Deslumbro-me cada vez que entro na casa de banho cá de casa: retrete limpa e asseada; autoclismo a funcionar, com água lá dentro e tudo. E torna a encher depois de despejado, oh alegria!. A pouco mais de um metro, um lavatório com águas correntes – quente e fria. Ao lado, papel higiénico espesso, macio e por vezes até colorido. Posso despejar o autoclismo de cada vez que a uso e não deitar-lhe somente meia caneca de água, uma vez por dia; posso entrar na casa de banho sem ter medo de apanhar lepra ou uma qualquer doença ainda desconhecida. Não tenho que inspirar uma golfada de ar à entrada, nem reter a respiração enquando a uso. Não tenho que estar alerta sobre outras formas de vida que comigo a partilhem. Enfim, é um luxo, um verdadeiro luxo que não tomo por garantido e com o qual me congratulo cada vez que dela uso faço.
Admito que quando parto para trabalho de campo o que mais me custa é a perspectiva das casas de banho manhosas, sem água e das latrinas. A imagem da casa de banho pública do Xai-Xai há-de acompanhar-me até ao fim da minha vida! Não me importam os ossos doridos por dias de solavancos em picadas; passo por cima dos insectos e moscas peganhentas; confio no Baygon verde para tratar dos colchões com vida interior; conformo-me com um chão de palhota para passar a noite; aceito o desjejum com mandioca cozida temperada de fumo; tolero o fato de suor e pó que habitualmente me cobre e que uma mão cheia de água não chega para remover; mas a latrina? A latrina? Confesso: tenho PAVOR da latrina! Aquele buraco escuro que eu suspeito estar cheio de coisas vivas em permanente mutação; o oscilar das tábuas quando a terra está ensopada das chuvas; a privacidade questionável; a vulnerabilidade da posição e o cheiro mais ou menos pungente… Tudo na latrina me confrange!
É este meu pavor partilhado pela minha amiga Angela, companheira de muitos anos de desconforto latrinal e a única com quem costumo ter estas conversas de m…a. Temos partilhadas horas de riso desfiando retretes! Enviou-me ela, no Dia Mundial da Retrete em 2009, um email recordando as piores retretes da sua (nossa) vida. Apesar de ser em inglês, por termos partilhado tantas delas e pela graça com que ela as descreve, acho que merece reprodução aqui na maschamba:
Toilets Without Borders (by Angela McIntyre)
Today is World Toilet Day, and so I pay tribute to the humble loo. There is a spotless, perfectly flushing loo, stocked with ludicrously soft 3-ply, next to a sink with hot running water, a mere 5 meters away from me. In fact, hang on just a second while I, um, powder my nose…Much better.
Ok. Where were we? Nampula, Mozambique 1994, the town water supply has been off for 2 weeks and you have to drive 20 or so km to a reservoir with buckets if you want some. Here you flush sparingly, once a day, it is your bath, cooking and drinking water you are pouring down there, and you’ve lugged it up 3 flights of stairs to boot. Everyone else flushes their loo once a day too, and the whole town is positively aromatic. Better to have a hole in the ground when the modcons are unreliable. If you have a place to dig one, that is.
Mozambique Island, 1993: one side you can swim on, the other side is the communal toilet, flushed by the tide. Water is just too scarce – it comes from a large communal rainwater cistern at a 300 year old fortress. You wait in the queue til it is your turn to lower your bucket in. You lug it home and boil, literally, the LIVING SHIT out of it, and still get giardia, unmistakable for the tectonic rumble it produces in your intestines and sulfurous breath. I digress.
Maputo, 1995: there is an old-fashioned tank with a chain up on the wall, which might actually work if there was water in it, but at least you can fill buckets from the standpipe in the street. Little consolation when you live in a crumbling apartment block with a broken elevator, on the 10th floor. What on earth were those Soviets thinking?
Let’s travel a ways north on the public bus – the Machimbombo – as it is fondly called – to Xai Xai, where there is a public loo at the bus station. Its state of perpetual overuse and overflow has compelled someone to simply build a low brick wall across the doorway to contain the horror, in which there are things swimming, visible to the naked eye. There are new species evolving in there, worthy of a Discovery Channel Documentary.
Inhassoro, 1996: I arrive at my new digs, where I will live for 2 years, on the beach, in a thatch-roofed hut. It is charming and typical, waterproof, lit by kerosene lamps at night. Then there is the loo. It is about 20 meters from the hut, 40 at night in the pitch dark. A deep, murky hole with a skimpy wall of reeds around it and a thatched roof. There is a bat nesting in the thatch, which swoops down disconcertingly while you are at your most vulnerable, trousers down around ankles trying not to slip into the HOLE. Some months later I suggest to the UNDP Evaluation Mission, come to look at my community vegetable garden project, that the sanitation here is less than satisfactory. There is no functioning water system in the village and we could use an Improved Latrine Program so we don’t get stinky, messy backups and cholera during the rainy season when the water table rises. They recoil in horror at my loo setup and vow to Do Something About It. Several months later, there is a UN truck spinning its tires in the beach sand outside my hut, villagers diligently trying to push it out. I see they have unloaded a shining, new, modern sparkling bathroom suite. Sink, tub, toilet, and yes, that mysterious other thing known as a ‘bidet’. The villagers gather round, gaping and whispering to one another. The white lady really is mad, it is now official. My village-cred has gone down the hole, but they are kind, charitable people and someone humors me, “Dona Angela, you have the nicest bathroom in all of Inhassoro!” Later we grow tomato plants in the bathtub and water the goats from the bidet. The toilet is cemented over the HOLE, allowing one to launch one’s self more easily to safety and avoid losing a flipflop to the abyss when the bat is startled. It was the nicest toilet in Inhassoro.
AL em parceria com AM
