Many people in modern society don’t think twice about going to the toilet. You go, do your business, pull the flush (wash your hands!) and leave. It’s as simple as that.

Visit a country like Kenya and you learn a whole other side to that basic part of life.

When I first came to Kenya, I was volunteering in a children’s home in a rural area. A local company had paid for a pump to be installed at the nearby river and there was some piped water provided by the local council, which had to be paid for at the end of each month. There were also water collection tanks under the gutters of some of the buildings. Despite all of this, we still experienced shortages of water and had to get used to flushing the toilet once a day...sometimes using dishwater or the water we’d bathed in. I didn’t have a storage tank under the building I was living in but was able to use a funnel and collect rainwater in 5litre water bottles and store them so the toilet could always be flushed every day.

When I told my friends and family about this I was surprised at their reaction. To many of them, this was a very basic way of living and sounded like hardship. To me, it was luxury compared to what many people have to use as toilet facilities.

Even within the children’s home I was living at, children used pit toilets during the day and flush toilets in the safety of the dormitories at night. Despite being cleaned regularly, there is still a stench from the general area of pit toilets which makes you wonder what they are like at close quarters. At many of our projects there is no alternative but to install pit toilets due to the scarcity of water. In fact at our most recent construction, a school for children with special needs, we included toilet blocks in the dormitories but quickly had to have pits dug as there was not enough water in the local area to maintain toilet facilities. A year on and we’re still trying to get funding for a borehole so that we can pump water to tanks and hopefully make use of the toilets.

In areas like Kibera slums, sanitation is one of the biggest problems. Flying toilets are still in use – small plastic bags being filled inside a home then thrown out the window. Residents also create their own structures, as seen in the photograph above, which mean that raw sewage gathers outside their homes. A number of NGOs have tried to address this issue by installing community toilets. Some of these are pay as you go facilities, others offer a key to those who pay a monthly fee.

Our football project, Kibera Mpira Mtaani, is based in an office above community toilets run by a local women’s group. Local residents pay a few shillings each time they wish to use the toilets and can also pay for water and the use of a cubicle for bathing. In that block, the waste from the toilets on the ground floor is used to produce gas which is then piped upstairs to a gas ring which allows the women’s group to cook food for selling. Between the charges from the toilets and the proceeds from the food sales, they area able to provide regular income for a number of women.

So you see, there can be much more to a visit to the toilet than you might think.