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Karanpur is in the state of Uttar Pradesh, four bumpy hours east of New Delhi. It's a haphazard collection of brick dwellings without doors or windows, split up by narrow paths humped in the middle so rain and sewage channel into rivulets on either side. A couple hundred people live here in walking distance of their fields, with cows roaming the alleys and goats tied up in courtyards. Stray dogs laze in the dust. A few frayed power lines bring weak, sporadic electricity. Plumbing is nonexistent. No trains or busses stop at Karanpur; it may not even appear on any maps. Karanpur is typical of Indian villages but for one respect: the fifty village girls who attend the Pardada Pardadi girls school. Pardada Pardadi was founded by Virendra "Sam" Singh, a sixty-eight-year-old American citizen and chemical engineer who left India in 1960 and returned in 2000 to invest his savings in a school for girls. Eight years later, the school enrolls 700 lowest-caste girls aged 8-21 from 43 surrounding villages, teaching them academics along with health, hygiene, money management, legal awareness, and life-changing vocational skills. It's not easy to convince a poor father to send his daughter to school. Daughters are valuable labor, even eight-year-old daughters. The abstract promise of an educated future cannot overcome the reality of living hand-to-mouth, praying for a good monsoon and fearing what drought might mean. It's not a question of a father's love -- it's stark economics. So Sam structured the school around tangible economic incentives for attendance. It provides free books, uniforms, and meals, and deposits ten rupees ($.25) a day into a bank account set up for each student, building a 30,000 rupee ($750) trust that matures the day the student graduates, turns twenty-one, or marries -- whichever comes first. This is a huge sum in rural India -- on graduation day, it transforms a girl from the daughter of a poor farmer into one of the richest and best-educated women in the entire district. Pardada Pardadi provides an education, job prospects, and a nest-egg -- enough to liberate a girl from marrying a barber at fifteen for the sake of a goat and to elevate her entire family along with her. But the promise of the future doesn't change the reality of the present: nearly every girl at Pardada Pardadi wakes up before sunrise to go poop in the fields.
Men only. Modesty forces women to poop in the fields before sunrise, or to hold it until after the sun sets. This is the practice across India, including in Karanpur. And the sanitary ramifications are staggering. Poop is a vector for bacteria and viruses, and it attracts insects and rodents that are equally unhealthy. People poop faster than Mother Nature can degrade it, which means people who poop in the same place day after day will inevitably come into contact with festering feces. A speck of poop on a shoe gets touched by a hand that passes a glass of water to a two-year-old: that's how disease spreads. Why do people poop in the fields? For some, it's because they're ignorant of hygiene and bacteriology; for others, it's because they're too poor to have any other choice.
But that wasn't what Sam was being asked. How can the school influence not just the girls, not just their families, but their neighbors as well? This was something Sam hadn't considered. His solution is the reason you're reading this: toilets. Here is an appliance that embodies his philosophy. A toilet protects its owner from the danger and humiliation of outdoor defecation. But it also provides a haven for neighbors to achieve the same standard of safety and dignity -- educated or not, Sam knows, no woman wants to poop in the fields. Here is an inexpensive way to improve health and spread sanitary practices beyond the walls of his students' dwellings. Sam settled on the Sulabh toilet model, which collects and composts waste in alternating pits that need to be emptied only once every ten years. But as inexpensive as they are, they still cost too much for Sam to fund them on his own. He approached participants of the World Toilet Summit for fundraising help. My wife and I accepted his offer to tour the school and meet his students; and now I'm passing his plea for help on to you. PoopReport is dedicated to laughing about poop. It's easy for us to laugh because the threat posed to us by poop is limited to the dangers of individual humiliation when Taco Bell attacks. Our toilets and sewers whisk our poop away, giving us dignity and sanitation in one quick flush. This fundraiser is our chance to offer the same basic dignity and sanitation to the girls of Pardada Pardadi -- to give them one more weapon in their struggle to break the poverty cycle. Sam has raised enough money to build thirteen toilets in Karanpur so far, each one graced with the green-and-yellow double diamond of Pardada Pardadi. Each toilet was spotless when we saw them -- testament, again, to the importance these girls place on hygiene in general and on toilets in particular.
Part of Sam's fundraising scheme is naming rights: if you sponsor a complete toilet, he'll inscribe your name on it. Upon completion, he'll send you photos of the toilet bearing your name, along with pictures of the students and the family whose lives will change because of your generosity. There's something funny about the idea of a toilet in the middle of India bearing the name "Di Uhreea" or "Bunga Din" -- but there's something truly moving about it, as well. So help take the first step towards making these girls' bathrooms as sanitary and dignified as your own. Please give today.
Click the button to pay using PayPal OR your credit card. The payment goes directly to Sam Singh's PayPal account -- PoopReport doesn't touch any of it. PoopReport will publish a running tally of the amount raised as that information arrives.
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