Its almost a year since Yolanda flattened Malapascua and gave us a rather large reality check. Since then the island has made a fantastic recovery thanks to so many generous donations that poured in from well wishers over seas. Since the storm we have been dealing with various island wide problems and Evolution has been busy dealing with sanitation here on Malapascua.
In April and May we blogged about our efforts to offer the community communal septic tanks which could handle the waste of several toilets in different houses. Normally a house here may have 5 or 6 inhabitants so a typical tank is connected to 4 houses collecting the waste of around 20 people. The uptake has been such that we have never stopped installing them since and now hundreds of people have access to their very first flushing toilet.
It seems it was such a good idea that Narendra Modi campaigned in India with the slogan that every Indian house would have a toilet under his tenure asking the people to ‘build toilets first and temples later’. He was elected Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy in May.
Since then the United Nations have taken up the campaign and have told us that 2.5 Billion people on the planet (with plenty of them on Malapascua) have no access to proper sanitation. In fact more people have access to mobile phones than to toilets, it says.
The world’s lack of progress in building toilets and ending open defecation is having a “staggering” effect on the health, safety, education, prosperity and dignity of 2.5 billion people, the UN deputy secretary general, Jan Eliasson, has warned.
Well we are doing our best to change that and our motto has always been that we want to offer ‘dignity to all’ through the donations we received. Having been presented with the stark facts of island life after Yolanda we hope we have at least achieved this to some degree.
November 8th is the anniversary of the Big Wind and November 19th is World Toilet Day and by then we hope to have given more then 500 people access to a toilet who never had one before.
As always none of this could have been made possible without the help and generosity of our friends across the globe.
For more information on what Evolution is doing for the local community in Malapascua contact info@evolution.con.ph
