Usha Chaumar spent the adult portion of her thirty-three years of life in Alwar, India, cleaning up after people who will not look at her as they pass her on the street. Usha wasn't a maid, or a cleaning lady. What she's cleaned during those adult years -- which began too early, at ten, when she was married off -- wasn't dust or footprints. It was human waste. That's because she was born into the Dalit, or untouchable, caste.
What does that mean, to "scavenge human waste"? It means to pick up shit with your bare hands. It's far more disgusting and demeaning than the words make it sound. Don't take my word for it -- CNN has a video.
Both the caste system and manual human waste scavenging are now outlawed in India. But it'll take more than laws to change a structure and 
history dating well before ours was even founded. The powerful people who benefit from the caste system don't want things to change; and those on the bottom rung can't afford to turn down the ten to twenty dollars a month that cleaning up human urine and feces earns them.
There are 300 women in Alwar who, like Usha, were born into this work.
But Usha has been lucky. Her life has taken a turn since meeting Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak.
Dr. Pathak, who was born into India's highest caste, had a life-changing moment at the age of 13, when he touched an untouchable. His grandmother made him ingest cow urine and dung, and then drink from the putrid Ganges River to "purify" himself. (How this could purify him is beyond me. Personally, I think she wanted him to associate untouchables with shit so that he would disassociate himself from them completely.) But not only did those efforts fail, they fueled a desire in the young man to break the barriers of class.
Dr. Pathak has been busy since this experience; it has been estimated that his Sulabh International organization has provided one million eco-friendly toilets to change the landscape of both India's soil and its society.
"I saw their conditions, and I thought they were living like ... pigs," Dr. Pathak said. "So why not give them some alternative jobs ... to do something else." By eliminating pit latrines, he eliminates the Dalits livelihood; and at the same time, he provides vocational training to help them start far better lives.
PoopReport knows about Dr. Pathak and Sulabh; Dave interviewed him and toured the organization's Delhi compound last year. But Sulabh and Dr. Pathak are in the news again because the organization recently held a fashion show in New York City with thirty-six former scavengers as models.
2008 is the International Year of Sanitation, as deemed by the United Nations. To celebrate it, Dr. Pathak and a crowd of New York socialites watched these former scavengers model saris they designed and tailored, walking alongside the models who sit atop the social structure of our own society, thus breaching social gaps here that they will hopefully, someday, crush in their own country.
Usha was crowned the belle of the ball, named the Princess of Sanitation. The formerly illiterate scavenger, who can now read and write, will never again stoop to scooping human feces to survive. And with Dr. Pathak's compassion and drive, millions of people in India may be freed as well.
