Dry Toilets Project

We finally have finished our dry toilets project! This project was started literally the first weekend we were in Santa Clara and it is an enormous relief to have finished it.

Community members in Cueva de los Tayos posing with their school's new dry toilet.

Challenges along the way included busy community contacts, impossibility of purchasing cured lumber for construction, difficulty finding even wet lumber for construction, beneficiaries who did not do what they said they would (and subsequently having to find new people to work with), uncooperative weather, etc.

But through all that, we completed the target of our grant proposal - building dry toilets in two different communities, at two schools and the homes of three families. Another dry toilet has already been finished at a local school using 100% local resources, and several individuals have asked us to consult with them about alternatives for human waste management. This is exciting for us because it is exactly the way that development projects should work, in that outside resources are only used to introduce a new idea, from which point local resources and ingenuity are used to improve and implement the idea. An example of this is that we originally designed the toilets to be free-standing elevated structures. This design worked well for the school toilets, but the families we worked with preferred direct access to the toilet from the house. We're happy they felt comfortable enough with us to suggest a change of the design, which we think turned out really nice!

Check out our post in the Rethinking High Tech series about human waste management, but for now, here's some pictures from this project.

A teenager carrying a palm-trunk post to the construction site in Cueva de los Tayos.

A man from Cueva de los Tayos preparing the posts to receive the floor of the structure.

Isaac explaining to Cueva de los Tayos community members how to attach the walls to the floor structure.

Isaac and Jaime attaching the walls to the floor in Santa Clara.

A little boy (nicknamed "the monkey") helps his uncle with the urine hose in Cueva de los Tayos.

Isaac and a student dig the trench for the urine hose in Santa Clara.

View of "the works" on a squatty toilet, from below. Recycled feed sack collects solids while recycled bottles take care of urine diversion.

View from above in a western-style toilet, with solids bag and urine bottle.

Rosa with her completed toilet, connected to their house which is still under construction. When finished, the entrance to the toilet will be from an outdoor porch.

The door to the bathroom in Heriberto and Yolanda's house, directly from the bedroom.

Students and teachers in Santa Clara laying the cobblestone path to the toilet.

This post is part of our Peace Corps Project series.