By Ishaku Emmanuel
My name is Alhaji Suleiman Mohammad, I live in Loco in Girei Local Government Area in Adamawa State. I am 75 years old and am married to four wives, I have 25 children and so many grandchildren.
We don’t have latrines in the houses which I build for my family to live in but we do go out whenever we have to defecate. You know how shit is, so we carry a hole or a digger to go out into the bush and we used the tools to make or dig a hole where we can defecate in it.
Whenever we finished defecating, we covered the hole and proceed back to the house. We have been doing that over the years since I was born and the children also learned from the way we live in this community.
You know how bush has been and how open the place is which makes the breeze blow and defecating in such areas makes the shit come out smooth and our anus feels the sweetness of the breeze.
Until one day UNICEF TEAM came to the community, met the Head Leader, and told him they have some important things to give to him, and they started shedding some light on the bad effect of defecating around and the diseases it brings to people living in the community. So the head leader gave his word that this information should be given to his people to hear, learn and adapt so that people will dig a local latrine.
After the Head gathered everyone, Alhaji Suleiman was unable to be among the people who were summed up because of his age but he was able to send his son who attended the meeting, unfortunately, the son did not attend the meeting and he thought that the digging of toilet is not necessary so when the son came back, he lied to the father on what the meeting was all about.
After the meeting with everyone at the leader’s palace, UNICEF Team took a bold step by triggering every household trying to know the number of households and how many toilets they needed to dig. Alhaji Suleiman Mohammad’s house was also among those houses that were triggered and some key leaders were selected to be those who will ensure that each household should build either a local toilet or a modern toilet depending on their financial effort. UNICEF TEAM also told them they will be coming time to time to check and see how the work is going on.
Immediately, people started digging toilets, and some that don’t have the strength to dig modern toilets also group themselves into groups of three and even ten to help each other to build different toilets at different locations. The number of toilets increased daily as people were digging and some pictures of latrines were also taken at different stages and are shown below:
Different shapes and sizes of latrines built by the households
UNICEF received news from those selected members which made UNICEF send some TEAM to see how far the work is going. The TEAM found out that some households have not started digging toilets. Alhaji Suleiman Mohammad was among those that did not dig the toilet. The team asked why did he not dig the toilet and he said that his son said the toilet is of no use to them.
UNICEF TEAM have to give fresh information to Alhaji Suleiman since the son did not tell him the truth. When he saw that the information given to him was good, he called all his household members and told them to start digging toilets for each household in the compound.
A month later, UNICEF TEAM came back to check and they were impressed with the number of toilets they saw, the community was given an overhead tank with a solar energy panel to generate the water and the community was declared Open Defecation Free (ODF).
Alhaji Suleiman Mohammad became the happiest person on earth because having a latrine helped to reduce the number of diseases his household members encountered.
Image of few latrines Alhaji Suleimanu Mohammad built for himself and his household
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