Everything Comes Down to Poo

(The title of this post is a 2-point reference. Search engines are cheating.)

I also spend a lot of time thinking about poop. Some of this is because I often end up eating/drinking something a bit dodgy and wondering if it's going to come back and bite me the next day. The other reason is that it pervades my life, and I'm not talking about the fact that (I am not making this up) every street in Bhorugram has an open sewer running right down the middle. See also, previous post about water supplies.

Poop pervades my life because of two factors. First, as the book has taught us, Everybody Poops. And, as I've mentioned in a previous entry, toilet paper is not common here, in the same way that diamonds are not common. So, you wipe with your left hand. Another thing that is not common is soap. Or, since we are in a desert, copious amounts of water. The net result is that most people are wandering around with a left hand covered in a microscopic (hopefully) film of poop and no way to wash off said poop. Some of them are involved in food preparation, and I pretend to myself that they wash their hands and the school provides them soap. Others are involved in the constant fetch-and-carry that keep India going, which means that eventually, they WILL touch something that I'm going to touch.

The second factor is that, in a resource-poor society, you waste nothing that could be used. You are thinking "fertilizer", but that only applies during the rainy season (when poop can be kept moist long enough to compost). The correct answer is "fuel". In villages throughout India, but especially here, a major source of fire for cooking/heating/etc. is the burning of dried dung, sometimes mixed with straw/sticks. There are piles of the stuff everywhere, looking like this:



If you look closely, you will notice that every one of those is covered in handprints. That's how they're made; pick up a lump of droppings and get to work. See above about handwashing.

So, basically every surface, and every standing body of water, has a nice batch of friendly fecal coliform bacteria on it. In a very real sense, every bite of food, every piece of furniture, every drop of water, contains a small bit of someone/something's poop. This, in turn, is why it's almost impossible to avoid getting sick -- the contamination is everywhere. As the saying goes, poop happens. Sometimes, it happens a lot.

The fact that I am now able to drink village water and eat pretty much anything in Rajgarh town without incident tells you exactly how much poop I've eaten in these three months. Pretty much world's best probiotic regimen. I'm sure I've been well-colonized with C. difficile after two years working in a hospital, but the bugs here are going to give those spores a run for their money.