Beyond the Pit: A Community Bathroom Built for Safety and Dignity
Imagine it’s the middle of the night and you wake up needing to use the bathroom. You have to venture outside to a dilapidated wood enclosure and squat over a ground pit. The smell of hundreds of others who’ve gone before you in nauseating. During Orongo’s flood season that pit may already be overflowing and completely unusable.
Now imagine you’re older in years and your knees don’t bend the way they used to. Your back aches, you have arthritis in your hips and you may even use a cane. Yet the squat over a pit is a necessity of everyday life. This is life right now, today, for families including orphans and widows in Orongo Village, Kenya.
What I Saw in January
On my most recent trip to Orongo Village I witnessed the kindest and most hard-working people doing their best with very little resources. The sanitation facilities are unsanitary and undignified. Most of the villagers rely on are pit latrines that are basically holes dug into the ground, often sheltered by a simple wood structure. Twice a year, when the seasonal flooding occurs, the pit latrines overflow completely, contaminating the ground and the drinking water sources around them.
Flooding doesn’t just impair a latrine, the villagers lose what they have again and again. Homes, belongings, whatever stability they’d managed to rebuild since the last flood are washed away.
It’s an ongoing heath crisis. Poorly sealed pits contaminate groundwater and nearby food sources, the pit latrines overflow, mixing with floodwater, spreading disease such a cholera and typhoid through the very water people use to cook, clean, and drink. It’s a dangerous situation as the latrine structures can collapse or wash away entirely, leaving communities
without any sanitation option exactly when they need it most.
For the elderly, this reality is even harder. Squatting over an open pit isn’t just unpleasant, it’s genuinely painful and dangerous when you’re dealing with arthritis, a bad back, or the ordinary aches that come with age. There’s no dignity in it and no safety. Unsafe sanitation isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s a daily, compounding threat to health, safety and dignity for an entire community.
Building Something Better
We’re raising funds to change this permanently with flood-safe biodigester bathrooms for Orongo Village. We’re partnering with a company based in Kisumu that specializes in constructing biodigester systems. They’ll hire local workers and build alongside our villagers, which matters to us. This isn’t something being done “to” the community, it’s something being built “with” them, creating jobs and skills along the way.
For many families in Orongo Village, this project means something simple and profound: a real, working toilet, and safe sanitation for the very first time in their lives.
How a Biodigester Actually Works
A biodigester bathroom looks like a normal toilet on the surface, but underneath, it’s a completely different system than a pit latrine. Waste flows into a sealed underground tank, where naturally occurring bacteria break it down anaerobically (without oxygen). That process does two important things:
It neutralizes the waste, turning it into safe, treated water and a small amount of biogas, rather than letting raw sewage sit in an open pit.
It’s sealed, which means even during flooding, waste isn’t washed out into the surrounding environment the way it is with an open pit latrine. Because the system is enclosed and elevated appropriately for the terrain, these bathrooms are built to withstand seasonal flooding rather than being destroyed and re-contaminating everything around them each time the water rises. That’s the heart of why this project matters so much here. It doesn’t just fix the smell and the indignity of a pit latrine, it breaks the cycle of disease and loss that comes back, year after year with the rains.
Built to Last
We’re not just installing bathrooms and walking away. As part of this project, we’re building in a 10-year maintenance plan, so these systems continue functioning properly for the community long after construction is finished. Dignity should be something that lasts, not just a fleeting gesture.
Why This Matters
It’s easy to forget that for so much of the world, a safe, clean, private bathroom is still out of reach. We take our safe and accessible bathrooms for granted while something as basic as “not squatting over an open hole in the ground” is, for many people, still just a dream.
We have the chance to make that dream real for the women and children of Orongo Village, giving them safe and sustainable bathrooms, for years to come.
Read more about our proposed Flood Proof Latrines
Comments