A l’Índia, les dones es lleven a les 4 de la matinada per anar a fer
les seves necessitats al camp, en plena foscor, patint les inclemències del
temps i l’assetjament dels homes. Komal Hadala va convèncer el seu marit i la
seva sogra de fer un vàter a casa. Tot seguit va convèncer a les seves veïnes i
ara tot el poble, prop de Nova Delhi, en té. Ningú es plantejava que les coses
poguessin canviar, però ho han aconseguit
Tired of dark fields
and jeering men: the
bride who led a 'toilet revolution'
Komal Hadala’s hellish treks
to relieve herself inspired a campaign that left her Indian
village flushed with success
Jeering
men: To
jeer at someone means to say or shout rude and insulting things to them to show
that you do not like or respect them.
Hellish
treks: Trek is
a long way. Word origin of 'trek'. Origin: C19: from Afrikaans, from Middle
Dutch trekken to travel; related to Old Frisian trekka. Hellish has relation with
the hell.
To
relieve herself: If people or animals relieve themselves, they urinate or defecate.
Flushed
with success: Feeling excited and confident after achieving something. Perhaps there
is a pun because other sense of
flush is this one: When someone flushes a toilet after using it, they fill the
toilet bowl with water in order to clean it, usually by pressing a handle or
pulling a chain. You can also say that a toilet flushes.
Pun: A pun is a clever and amusing
use of a word or phrase with two meanings, or of words with the same sound but
different meanings.
Amrit Dhillon in New Delhi
Wed 23 Jan 2019 06.00 GMT
The day after her wedding, Komal Hadala was shaken awake at 4am by her
mother-in-law. They joined a group of women who were waiting outside the house,
in Nithora village, Uttar Pradesh.
“It was the time when they went outdoors to
relieve themselves in the fields before men started appearing. I couldn’t
believe it. It was total darkness outside. And it had been raining,” says
Hadala.
Komal Hadala at her home in Nithora village, near Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh. Photograph: Amrit Dhillon
They walked over 1km to find a suitable spot but the rain had made
the ground and the undergrowth squelchy and disgusting, she says. “There were insects because of the rain
and I was petrified. What was worse was the dark. At that hour you couldn’t see
a thing and it was so disorientating.”
Squelch: Making a sucking sound like the
one produced when you are walking on soft, wet ground
Disgusting: Works as an adjective. Is something
extremely unpleasant, completely unacceptable. (asquerós, asqueroso)
Hadala, 22, had spent her childhood in a house in the Indian capital that
had a toilet. This new fact of life in her married home was a rude awakening.
It wasn’t long before she began pestering her husband and
in-laws to build a toilet. They agreed. But one year later, by last summer,
Hadala had succeeded in persuading 250 other families to build one too, giving
Nithora the distinction of being “open defecation-free”,
as it is known in India.
Pestering: If you say that someone is
pestering you, you mean that they keep asking you to do something, or keep
talking to you, and you find this annoying.
ODF: The original meaning of ODF (Open
Defecation Free) stated that all community members are using sanitation
facilities (such as toilets) instead of going to the open for defecation.
Hadala tells the story of her toilet revolution
sitting in her home with the women who supported her mission – her husband’s
mother, grandmother and sister. The house is solid, though cold and oddly
designed, and it is strange to think that, when building it, no one in the
family, not even the women, thought of installing a toilet.
“We never knew anything else. This is how it has
always been. We had no
choice but to go out in the fields. It was hell – getting up so early,
the freezing cold in the winters, the fog, the fear that some man will stumble across you. The worst was – oh my god – when I used to
have a bad stomach,” says Athri, her grandmother-in-law.
Stumble
across: If you
stumble across something or stumble on it, you find it or discover it
unexpectedly. I think the sense, in this case, is more aggressive.
Sometimes men would suddenly appear and start jeering. At
other times, a farmer would
turn up armed with a
stick to run them off
his fields. At night, women had to wait for cover of darkness before venturing out. For pregnant women, the sick and the elderly,
with arthritic joints and mobility
issues, answering nature’s call was an ordeal.
Venture
out: To
dare, to do something which requires a lot of courage.
Ordeal: A very unpleasant and painful
or difficult experience
After Hadala had expressed her intense shame to
her in-laws, the family approached the village
council head, Chahat Ram, to ask if funds were available. Ram acted swiftly to access the funds available for building toilets
under the government’s Clean India campaign to end open defecation.
Approach: To speak to, write to, or visit
someone in order to do something such as make a request or business agreement
Swiftly: quickly or immediately
Prime minister Narendra Modi had famously told
Indians once to build toilets first, temples later. His goal is to have a
toilet in every home. More than 90 million toilets have been built since 2014
when he came to power.
But persuading villagers to change their
centuries-old habits is not easy. Surveys have shown that in some areas, more
than half the people still defecate in the open. “I had to keep meeting
families to din it into them that going outside led to
diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid and other illnesses,” says Hadala. “They didn’t
think there was any link between illness and going outdoors but I learned all
this at school. Luckily school children were receptive and they took the
message home.”
Din
something into somebody: To say something forcefully and repeatedly to someone so that they
remember it
With funds coming in fast, building 250 toilets
was not difficult. Persuading villagers to use them was another matter. Some of
the families with existing toilets had been using them for storage and
continued going outdoors.
The reasons were the same as those found in
many villages where toilets have been built but remain unused. A toilet inside
a home defiles its “purity”, goes a
popular belief. You can’t have a toilet near a kitchen where you cook or near
the puja (prayer) room. Moreover, going al fresco is better, say the elderly, because you
get some exercise too.
Defile: To make unfit for ceremonial
use; desecrate, profane.
Go: In this case it has the sense
of “says”
Hadala got together with a bunch of women who,
armed with torches and whistles, patrolled the fields to warn off the recidivists, mostly male. “The men seemed to think the toilets
had been built only for women, not for them,” says Satto, Hadala’s
mother-in-law.
Recidivist:
Someone
who has committed crimes in the past and has begun to commit crimes again, for
example after a period in prison.
It was not the embarrassment of having a
spotlight shone on your naked bottom accompanied by a screeching whistle, nor the hygiene or dignity argument that
won most of the men over. It was the issue of women’s safety that convinced
them. They realised that being out in the dark at 4am or 9pm was dangerous for
the women in the family.
Shine / shone
or shined: When the sun or a light shines, it gives out bright light.
Screech: When a bird, animal, or thing
screeches, it makes a loud, unpleasant, high-pitched noise.
“Now, I can say with pride that no one in the
villages defecates in the open. The whole atmosphere has been changed by
[Hadala’s] efforts and everyone is keeping every bit of the village clean,”
says Ram.
The village school, for example, has a row of
neat and clean separate toilets for boys and girls – a far cry
from many village schools where there is often no toilet at all – a running
water supply and several places for handwashing. The girls get free sanitary pads.
Far cry:
A long
way
Sanitary
pad: A
sanitary napkin, sanitary towel, sanitary pad, menstrual pad, or pad is an
absorbent item worn in the underwear by women and girls who are menstruating.
“It took a young girl to
get us to raise our standards. But now everyone is involved and we plan to keep
it up,” says Ram.
It took..: Was necessary …
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