Building a Compost Toilet in Fiji – maikeli, m@greatempty.us, 7nov04

History

Events back in August:

• Thru no fault of her own I’m sure, Eileen, my Peace Corps boss, is still arranging for site placements only weeks before the end of FRE2’s PST. We visit Yadua & Cuvu, but are hesitant about them.
• Then we hear that thanks to the well-intentioned efforts of my counterpart Erami, Komave koro, on the Coral Coast, is expecting a PCV, even tho’ no one’s submitted an application.
• So I take them an application, and they submit it. They have a house all picked out, a very nice clean place right off the beach, private yet close enuf for safety, with a world-class view.
• Eileen & her assistant Alumita come and we meet with the village.

“Do you want a PCV?” Eileen asks. YES, they answer. “Will you take good care of her?” she asks. ‘Her’? (Damn.) Oh…YES, they answer. “Can she live in the house?” she asks. YES, they answer. “But it needs a bathroom, will you build the bathroom?” YES, it will be ready in 2 weeks, they answer. “And how will you pay for it?” Now they look very confused. “Erami said the Provincial Office will pay for it.” I wish. But no way.

Erami

• So now we have a village & house but no bathroom. ICM (Integrated Coastal Management, headed by Bill A. of USP) was, at the time, funding a composting-toilet (“CT”) in Rewa province, the project supervised by PCV Mary, idea being to demonstrate that CTs are a better/cheaper/non-polluting alternative to flush-toilets, which are continuing to murder the ecosystem on the now-Coral-less-Coast. I ask Bill if he would fund a bathroom in Komave, and he agrees (a bit hesitant about the shower component  - there’s no need to prove that showers work – but he goes along with it) providing $1000 funding.
• I design a CT for the house. It’s really a near-ideal situation. Elevation is essential (as the waste needs to fall via gravity into a relatively deep container of some sort, preferably not subject to flooding), and the house floor is elevated on posts about 2 feet above ground level. There’s plenty space for the bathroom and associated wetland. The building is wood-frame, so it will be easy to cut a door in the wall between studs thru to the new bathroom. And the exposure is perfect: The bathroom will be north-facing – sun’s heat will promote the compost-process, as well as accelerate aeration via the big black-painted ventilation pipe. Also, being adjacent to the sea, ventilation will be enhanced by the trade wind from the southeast. I spent a lot of time & effort on the design. I discussed it with the family who owned the house, the carpenter who would build it, and others in the koro.
• Aly, the new PCV, arrives and takes up temporary residence with a host family.
• I visit Komave. We discuss the plan with the carpenter. But the owner of the house appears. He doesn’t want Aly living there after all. He has another house that will be better. We go look. It’s VERY large (much TOO large for one American), there is someone currently staying there, and, oh, as Fijian family members come visit, they of course will stay there too. Oh, and the flush-toilet system has never quite been finished, needs some work.
• Sorry, doesn’t meet Peace Corps standards, and there’s no way ICM will pay to fix a flush toilet.
• Erami magicly appears, and there is a long long discussion in Fijian among all the parties except me (who’s an idiot when it comes to language). It’s not clear whether Erami has been helping the matter or screwing it all up. Finally, they announce: it’s OK, you can have the house, you can build the CT.  
• So I order the first load of materials for the CT, over $300 worth. The hardware store promises they will be delivered that very day.

Now it’s September…

• A week later the materials arrive. We’re ready to begin.
• But the owner-family announces that no, they won’t give the house. (It will never be clear what the problem was. It may be that they had some relative who wanted the house. Or they hoped for ICM $ to fix up house#2. Or that they didn’t trust the CT concept. Or even that they were concerned about Aly settling for a substandard CT when she should rightly have a proper flush-one. Further complicating the issue is that it seems the wife is calling the shots behind the scene, but only the husband speaks to the issue in public.)
• The hardware store retrieves the materials, luckily at no expense or hard feelings.
• There is another hi-level meeting. The koro offers the Dispensary as an alternative. Relative to the first place it is a great disappointment, in the midst of the village, closer to the highway, 3 feet off the main vehicle-and-foot traffic root into the koro, and immediately adjacent to where all the vans/taxis unload their passengers late at nite. Aly is extremely disappointed. But wha’ d’ ya do? So it’s agreed.
• I again spend levu time/effort designing another CT. This building is much more challenging than the last – it’s closer to the neighbors (less free space), the exposure is wrong, the siding is metal instead of wood (more difficult to work with), the building is relatively poorly constructed (non-plumb, non-square), and very-most-importantly, its floor is at ground level. Recall that a CT needs some ‘drop’, and there’s nothing more ridiculous than a 2-story outhouse among 1-story homes, eh?
• I want to use wood-frame/wood-siding, but the cost is way-over budget, so we go with corrugated-metal siding, at 1/3 the cost.
• The first floor-plan likewise is way over budget, so I come up with a more compact design. Aly approves.
• I order the materials, and they are delivered, promised same day, this time arrived only a few days later, except the cement (which upon construction is the 2^nd thing needed, after re-bar). It’s now about 28sept. It shows up a few days later.
• I am walking to the site with the village carpenter, a good, skilled, & hard-working man, intending to START CONSTRUCTION, when he asks: “so, how will I be paid?”
• Our arrangement with the village, post-“Provincial-Office-will-pay”-dreamland was that ICM would buy materials, village would provide all labor. (In Fijian villages, labor is generally considered essentially free.) Naturally we of PC assumed the ‘carpenter’ (in Fijian, matai, not the guy that does the work but really the ‘foreman’, the guy who DIRECTS the work) was included in that, and in fact maybe the easy-going village leadership, with whom we had the agreement, assumed that too, but apparently no one included the carpenter in those particular discussions, and until this 11^th-&-7/8ths hour, the carpenter himself was too polite to mention it. He is a very busy hardworking man. He has not time nor inclination to donate his time, most especially to a project he has never done before. How is he to direct construction, when *i* am directing *him*?
• So we all go to the Turaga ni Koro and present the problem. It seems this issue has not occurred to anyone. (They call the TK the ‘mayor’. In theory, someone else makes the policy decisions, and he’s the Exec who gets the work done.) The Chief (a wonderful white-haired man, Ratu Suli) is not around today for consultation. After some contemplation, TK announces that, yes, the koro will pay the matai.
• To this, the carpenter, who is Fijian and a resident of the village, replies, “Fijians say that, but they don’t know how they’ll do it.” This conflictive assertion is most unusual.
• We all agree to yet another bose with the chief, when he’s back in 2 days.
• But Aly & I discuss it after. This is ridiculous, and extremely stressful. We just want to get it done.
• We go to the carpenter and propose that *I* will serve as the matai. He is quite visibly, obviously relieved to be released of the burden.
• We dig the footings that day. TK and others assist.

Aly, with Jo (Turaga ni Koro, Komave)

4Sep: PROBLEM: we will need tools. No carpenter likes to loan his tools (they come back dull, destroyed, or not at all). So I buy my own (non-reimbursed), over a hundred bux worth. I just want to get it done.

5Sep: a host of village folks, Aly, & I work all day til dark. Finally started, foundation done.

And so on: it was a long battle. A&I worked very hard, as did numerous village men & ‘youth’, who some days worked very long hard days, who other days drifted in&out, who others could work not at all, diverted by other Fijian responsibilities (church, ceremonies, harvest, fishing, accommodation of tourists (Komave has a very fine and highly organized tourist program), etc). Even A&I were preventing from working some days, hammering being inconducive to prayer.

I was very pleased with villager participation & cooperation, especially given that their attitude is skeptically ‘wait & see’. Despite our explanations of how flush toilets have destroyed the reef, they are quite happy with them. As the TK of Biasevu eloquently (& politely) related: You white people came and told us to replace our pit toilets with flush toilets; now you tell us to replace our flush toilets with something that seems very much like what we had before.

2Nov: DONE (except filling the waterline trench across the road with sand, so that the stony soil will not wear thru the plastic pipe, and the vault doors could use some planing). (Oh, and the old electric line, hanging in tatters from a pole, has yet to be repaired. Someone else’s responsibility.) The whole process, despite truly diligent effort, took like 2.5 months. About 2 days per square foot.

Lessons Learned

· Duh, everything takes a long time.

· I’m a very competent carpenter in the US, but it means nothing here. The materials are different, THERE ARE NO POWER TOOLS, I suck at the language (and many of the laborers likewise at English), there is no Ace Hardware or Home Depot within any short distance and I don’t have my pickup to buzz over there even if there was.

· Even speaking English with the hardware store guys (who were marvelous), it’s like they have a different term for everything. Ask for “lumber” & they have no idea you’re referring to “timber”. Even a 2x4, here, is a “4x2”.

· Tho’ they do understand the English system of measurement, basicly they’re on metric. Hence, ask for a 20-ft length of pipe, and you’ll get a metric-based thing that’s a couple feet less. My next project, I’ll design it in metric.

· Ask for a 2x4 in the US and you get a 1.5x3.5. Ask for a 2x4 here, you get a 2x4. OK, ask for a 1x2 here, you get a 1x2, right? No, you get a 5/8x1&9/16. This can be critical.

· The wood here (Vesi) is VERY DENSE. Extremely difficult to cut/nail/drill/etc. Especially when the night after they delivered it (stacked ATOP the metal roofing), it rained, hard.

· Corrugated metal likewise is hard to work with.

· THERE ARE NO POWER TOOLS. So not only is it (very) physically hard work, but every cut comes out quite significantly crooked. Nothing fits tight, a major issue for someone seeking hi-quality.

· Transport of materials is a significant issue. The hardware stores deliver for free, but when? Will the bus or mini-bus accommodate 20-ft timbers or pipes?

· Schedule a time and day for work, and no one will be there. Instead, just start working. People come.

· Fijians in fact know what they are doing very well, there’s one way to do it, and if you try to do it a different way, they are skeptical, and politely offer to do it for you the right way. I learned a lot.

· On the other hand, they accept a much lower standard of quality than would ever be accepted in the US. The 4-ft-hi block wall for the CT vault, which I left to them to do because surely they know how to build block walls, was 2 inches off, top-to-bottom. Really bad.

· Kids are everywhere, get into everything, are always in the way, scream randomly, and non-maliciously relocate every item you set down.

· It rains, torrentially. After that, it’s intensely hot/humid for a while. Then it rains.