Some VERY basic water infrastructure instructions:
If you make TWO water supplies, ONE that is potable and one that is useful for showering, washing hands, etc., it will take fewer resources to establish an adequate supply of water. You will need to educate people that there are TWO water standards and one of them should NOT be used to drink or cook.
I actually lived in a house once with one faucet marked "potable water." You were not supposed to drink the water from the bathroom taps, etc.
This was in the USA, not far from where the movie Erin Brockovich was set in the High Desert of southern California. I have had people tell me "That has nothing to do with it. There must be some OTHER reason you had that arrangement." and I'm sure no one will ever officially admit there was any connection between the two things, so "anecdotally."
A third level of water quality is Greywater. It can be used for things like flushing toilets and watering a garden. See: Greywater Reuse for tips on how to use greywater to further extend your limited water supply.
Fast-running water has a higher oxygen level than slow-moving or stagnant water, so will typically have a lower load of microbes. Water sourced from waterfalls or close to waterfalls MAY be a means to get water that needs LESS treatment to make it potable.
DO make sure you TEST IT both before and after treatment. This is a bet that water from waterfalls is probably cleaner, NOT a guarantee. It's only intended to make it EASIER to establish an adequate water supply and potentially lower the burden involved in treating the water.
As a general principle: Source water for your water supply UPHILL as much as possible and things like latrines DOWNHILL from your water sources. Do NOT place latrines uphill or upstream from a point of water collection for your water supply.
Equipment matters. Lead pipes will poison people but using copper in the infrastructure where possible/appropriate may reduce how much water treatment you need because copper kills microbes. "On contact" but can take up to an hour to kill everything.
Peroxide is a non-toxic bleach substitute. This means you can use it for water treatment or cleaning equipment used in the water infrastructure without leaving behind any toxic residue. It's also relatively cheap.
You can look for "water testing field kits" to get test kits useful in rural settings. There are also videos online telling you how to use them.
You will want to get official numbers and details from somewhere, but generally speaking:
It's not ideal, but would be an improvement over NO toilets at all. Make sure people know "Do NOT go near the ditch. You will get SICK. Children cannot play there."
Biodegradable tampons would be okay. They should not have plastic applicators. Find a list of acceptable BRANDS and educate people about which products are okay to use there.
Watershed Academy is a free online education source from the Environmental Protection Agency in the USA. Learn something about watersheds and tend to the wetlands to make sure it has the right (native) plants for the region, etc.
If you aren't disposing of plastic applicators and similar, let the wetlands do its job. Adding harsh chemicals will harm the wetlands, not help treat the waste.
If done right, this can actually be part of a wetlands restoration program.
In place of urinals, designate specific trees as places to urinate. For cleanup in place of a sink, supply hand-sanitizer, spray peroxide (in a dark bottle) or a spray or pump bottle of salt water on a hook or shelf nearby (maybe as part of a privacy wall if you need to build such).
It can be untreated sea water if it is gathered from a place where there is NO effluent. Do realize sand may clog the pump mechanism if it has too much sand in it, so you may want to develop a means to screen out the sand.
While homeless, I routinely peed in the bushes and cleaned up with hand sanitizer PLUS peroxide, both of which are very drying. When we were doing a LOT of clean up, our hands would get raw, so we sometimes bought an empty plastic spray bottle and filled it with sea water.
So I have "field tested" this. I have firsthand experience with using this to clean up and I have a serious medical condition. If it were not adequate, it would have made me sick. And, yes, I have firsthand experience with sand clogging the spray mechanism.
I will suggest you MAY want to experiment with supplying EITHER hand sanitizer OR spray peroxide PLUS salt water. Then people have a choice and if they have health issues, TWO types of disinfectant may be more effective than ONE. That was why we used TWO: we were very, very sick and one was not adequate for our needs.
If "tree urinals" sounds terrible, I have read that Paris, France used to have urinals on the street that were basically a little enclosure and you peed directly on the sidewalk and that was all there was too it.
This can do double duty because it will both water and fertilize the trees. You cannot use untreated human urine on crops but it's fine to pee on the base of a fruit tree or other trees you want to grow, like a windbreak, mangroves, etc.
Anecdotally, one of the biggest trees I have ever seen was next to a "rest area" with a picnic table and trash can in the middle of nowhere with no other services. Pretty sure truckers routinely stopped there, ate lunch at the table and peed on the tree.
Yes, a woman can pee standing up.
She needs to bend her knees a little and lean forward (to help aim pee to the back), drop her pants or panties down to about the knee, lift any skirts or long shirts UP, pull her pants or panties forward and try to aim her urine stream to the back. Ideally, stand where any slope, no matter how slight, causes pee to run off behind you so it doesn't puddle around your shoes.
She will need to sort out a few details of clean up. I generally wore a feminine pad at night while homeless to catch any urine left in pubic hair to keep my clothes clean and used regular bathrooms with toilet paper during the day.
But if you have NO toilets currently and NO means to clean up, this should be a minor detail locals can sort out and share tips about as a step forward over open defecation with no facilities at all.
If she is on her period, it may be best to go to a latrine instead of a tree urinal, but the other three weeks of the month, she doesn't have to stand in a potentially long line. She can pee standing up like a guy if you have a privacy enclosure with the means to clean up attached to it.
You may also be able to add a wash basin and pitcher to homes that don't have running water so people can do things like brush teeth at home. This used to be common in the US and Europe before plumbing became standard in most homes.
I grew up with public showers at beaches and pools and lakes. At lakes or beaches, there were sometimes showers outdoors for rinsing off the salt water or lake water and changing clothes. They were typically a wooden enclosure with a door that latched and a solid, clean floor of some sort (like concrete) and some kind of drainage for the water.
Such showers usually ONLY had cold water. If you are swimming in a lake, it's probably not real cold out. In warm weather, unheated water is probably fine.
At pools, there were often indoor, gender-segregated (one for guys, one for gals) bathrooms that included showers.
The showers were typically in a two-section stall, an outer section with a bench and hooks so you could take your clothes off and set your dry street clothes down, an inner section with the actual shower. There was typically a curtain between the outer section and the public areas and a second curtain between the two sections to keep the changing area DRY so your street clothes were dry.
These showers typically had hot water but not always or sometimes you could get cold water free and PAY for the hot water. If supplying hot water from the start is out of reach, just make sure there are SHOWERS and plan to add hot water capacity LATER.
Productivity WILL go up once people have better hygiene and are healthier. Putting in basic infrastructure will lead to more wealth and physical energy to improve things even more down the road.
If there isn't much traffic, an attendant can help provide safety. If there is a LOT of traffic, this may not be necessary. There tends to be safety in numbers. Serious crimes tend to take place when there are no or few witnesses.
Run some numbers and try to find the sweet spot with enough showers and enough privacy and security for your people and the conditions on the ground where you are. If you currently have NO showers for a lot of people, even if you can only supply one shower per week it will make the people healthier.
You will also want to establish some rules and best practices. If someone is very sick, you may want a separate shower for some cases that will have higher water quality and get cleaned more aggressively so you can try to keep them away from the shared showers so they don't spread disease.
I showered ONCE A MONTH for two years while homeless and that was a big improvement over cleaning up at sinks or at the beach. I talk about that some here and that post links to other stuff I have written about showers for homeless americans.
Remember:
You can EXPECT people to "get sick" for a while AFTER you improve sanitation and hygiene. It's a healing reaction, sort of like going through drug withdrawal. You feel worse for a while before it gets better.
If you suddenly have some kind of toilets and showers, etc. people will have a die-off reaction because they have fewer germs living on them and in them. It's probably NOTHING to be concerned about if it doesn't get real extreme and goes away in, say, two to six weeks.
If it continues too long, check to see if you messed something up and are making people actually sick.
If you have an issue like worms, a de-worming program implemented around the same time as improved santitation and water infrastructure could amplify the effectiveness of BOTH programs. De-worming programs are relatively cheap and effective with long-terms positive outcomes:
B vitamins are mostly found in animal products, like beef, dairy products and seafood. Seaweed and mushrooms are vegetarian sources of B vitamins.
For lactose intolerant populations, bone broth can be used as a source of calcium. Seeds (poppy, sesame, celery, chia), sardines and salmon are other good sources of calcium.
Butter (clarify it if you are lactose intolerant), egg yolks and fats from meat (such as bacon or bacon drippings) are some appropriate sources of fats. Vegetarian sources of fats include coconut oil, palm oil and nuts (such as cashews, macadamias and almonds).
Clarified butter is butter heated over low heat to separate the milk solids and water from the fat. After the milk solids are removed, clarified butter stays liquid and can be safely used for up to two months without refrigeration. It is typically stored in a glass container.
Egg yolks are high in cholesterol which is essential for brain health. Anyone experiencing neurological issues during this time may need extra cholesterol, though 95 percent of the cholesterol in the brain is made in house starting with vitamin B5 as an essential building block.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no vegetarian sources of cholesterol. Though it can be hard to get enough B vitamins from vegetarian sources, there are plant-based sources of B vitamins and the body can build cholesterol in house from B5.
- A Beginner’s Guide to Rainwater Harvesting
- 23 DIY Rainwater Harvesting Systems You Can Build at Home
- WikiHow has a science experiment aimed at American school kids. It's potentially a practical means for households to desalinate water from the sea in underdeveloped areas to help increase the supply of water. You should also boil the water to kill germs.
If you make TWO water supplies, ONE that is potable and one that is useful for showering, washing hands, etc., it will take fewer resources to establish an adequate supply of water. You will need to educate people that there are TWO water standards and one of them should NOT be used to drink or cook.
I actually lived in a house once with one faucet marked "potable water." You were not supposed to drink the water from the bathroom taps, etc.
This was in the USA, not far from where the movie Erin Brockovich was set in the High Desert of southern California. I have had people tell me "That has nothing to do with it. There must be some OTHER reason you had that arrangement." and I'm sure no one will ever officially admit there was any connection between the two things, so "anecdotally."
A third level of water quality is Greywater. It can be used for things like flushing toilets and watering a garden. See: Greywater Reuse for tips on how to use greywater to further extend your limited water supply.
Fast-running water has a higher oxygen level than slow-moving or stagnant water, so will typically have a lower load of microbes. Water sourced from waterfalls or close to waterfalls MAY be a means to get water that needs LESS treatment to make it potable.
DO make sure you TEST IT both before and after treatment. This is a bet that water from waterfalls is probably cleaner, NOT a guarantee. It's only intended to make it EASIER to establish an adequate water supply and potentially lower the burden involved in treating the water.
As a general principle: Source water for your water supply UPHILL as much as possible and things like latrines DOWNHILL from your water sources. Do NOT place latrines uphill or upstream from a point of water collection for your water supply.
Equipment matters. Lead pipes will poison people but using copper in the infrastructure where possible/appropriate may reduce how much water treatment you need because copper kills microbes. "On contact" but can take up to an hour to kill everything.
Peroxide is a non-toxic bleach substitute. This means you can use it for water treatment or cleaning equipment used in the water infrastructure without leaving behind any toxic residue. It's also relatively cheap.
You can look for "water testing field kits" to get test kits useful in rural settings. There are also videos online telling you how to use them.
You will want to get official numbers and details from somewhere, but generally speaking:
- Potable water needs to meet a high standard and have very little minerals, chemicals or germs. (No, it doesn't have to have NONE. That would be DISTILLED water and that is not generally something you drink.)
- Non-potable water for showering, etc. should be germ-free as much as possible but can have higher levels of minerals and other chemicals, as long as it's not TOXIC.
- Greywater may have some germs and other contaminants, like soap residue, in addition to minerals and chemicals.
Sanitation: Latrines, etc.
For toilets in very underdeveloped areas, you can set up latrines that drain to a nearby wetlands. Ideally, have pipes from the latrine to the wetlands. If that's not feasible, you can build an open ditch to drain to it and educate people to stay away from the ditch until you can improve it and upgrade to pipes.It's not ideal, but would be an improvement over NO toilets at all. Make sure people know "Do NOT go near the ditch. You will get SICK. Children cannot play there."
Biodegradable tampons would be okay. They should not have plastic applicators. Find a list of acceptable BRANDS and educate people about which products are okay to use there.
Watershed Academy is a free online education source from the Environmental Protection Agency in the USA. Learn something about watersheds and tend to the wetlands to make sure it has the right (native) plants for the region, etc.
If you aren't disposing of plastic applicators and similar, let the wetlands do its job. Adding harsh chemicals will harm the wetlands, not help treat the waste.
If done right, this can actually be part of a wetlands restoration program.
In place of urinals, designate specific trees as places to urinate. For cleanup in place of a sink, supply hand-sanitizer, spray peroxide (in a dark bottle) or a spray or pump bottle of salt water on a hook or shelf nearby (maybe as part of a privacy wall if you need to build such).
It can be untreated sea water if it is gathered from a place where there is NO effluent. Do realize sand may clog the pump mechanism if it has too much sand in it, so you may want to develop a means to screen out the sand.
While homeless, I routinely peed in the bushes and cleaned up with hand sanitizer PLUS peroxide, both of which are very drying. When we were doing a LOT of clean up, our hands would get raw, so we sometimes bought an empty plastic spray bottle and filled it with sea water.
So I have "field tested" this. I have firsthand experience with using this to clean up and I have a serious medical condition. If it were not adequate, it would have made me sick. And, yes, I have firsthand experience with sand clogging the spray mechanism.
I will suggest you MAY want to experiment with supplying EITHER hand sanitizer OR spray peroxide PLUS salt water. Then people have a choice and if they have health issues, TWO types of disinfectant may be more effective than ONE. That was why we used TWO: we were very, very sick and one was not adequate for our needs.
If "tree urinals" sounds terrible, I have read that Paris, France used to have urinals on the street that were basically a little enclosure and you peed directly on the sidewalk and that was all there was too it.
This can do double duty because it will both water and fertilize the trees. You cannot use untreated human urine on crops but it's fine to pee on the base of a fruit tree or other trees you want to grow, like a windbreak, mangroves, etc.
Anecdotally, one of the biggest trees I have ever seen was next to a "rest area" with a picnic table and trash can in the middle of nowhere with no other services. Pretty sure truckers routinely stopped there, ate lunch at the table and peed on the tree.
Yes, a woman can pee standing up.
She needs to bend her knees a little and lean forward (to help aim pee to the back), drop her pants or panties down to about the knee, lift any skirts or long shirts UP, pull her pants or panties forward and try to aim her urine stream to the back. Ideally, stand where any slope, no matter how slight, causes pee to run off behind you so it doesn't puddle around your shoes.
She will need to sort out a few details of clean up. I generally wore a feminine pad at night while homeless to catch any urine left in pubic hair to keep my clothes clean and used regular bathrooms with toilet paper during the day.
But if you have NO toilets currently and NO means to clean up, this should be a minor detail locals can sort out and share tips about as a step forward over open defecation with no facilities at all.
If she is on her period, it may be best to go to a latrine instead of a tree urinal, but the other three weeks of the month, she doesn't have to stand in a potentially long line. She can pee standing up like a guy if you have a privacy enclosure with the means to clean up attached to it.
Hygiene: Showers, etc.
When I was homeless in the US, I saw other homeless people carry a toothbrush in their backpack or whatever and I was really grossed out by that. I used a toothbrush ONCE and threw it out OR used mouthwash OR just rinsed my mouth with clean water. If you have residents with NO household water supply, mouthwash even once or twice a week will do more for oral health than brushing with an unsanitary toothbrush.You may also be able to add a wash basin and pitcher to homes that don't have running water so people can do things like brush teeth at home. This used to be common in the US and Europe before plumbing became standard in most homes.
I grew up with public showers at beaches and pools and lakes. At lakes or beaches, there were sometimes showers outdoors for rinsing off the salt water or lake water and changing clothes. They were typically a wooden enclosure with a door that latched and a solid, clean floor of some sort (like concrete) and some kind of drainage for the water.
Such showers usually ONLY had cold water. If you are swimming in a lake, it's probably not real cold out. In warm weather, unheated water is probably fine.
At pools, there were often indoor, gender-segregated (one for guys, one for gals) bathrooms that included showers.
The showers were typically in a two-section stall, an outer section with a bench and hooks so you could take your clothes off and set your dry street clothes down, an inner section with the actual shower. There was typically a curtain between the outer section and the public areas and a second curtain between the two sections to keep the changing area DRY so your street clothes were dry.
These showers typically had hot water but not always or sometimes you could get cold water free and PAY for the hot water. If supplying hot water from the start is out of reach, just make sure there are SHOWERS and plan to add hot water capacity LATER.
Productivity WILL go up once people have better hygiene and are healthier. Putting in basic infrastructure will lead to more wealth and physical energy to improve things even more down the road.
If there isn't much traffic, an attendant can help provide safety. If there is a LOT of traffic, this may not be necessary. There tends to be safety in numbers. Serious crimes tend to take place when there are no or few witnesses.
Run some numbers and try to find the sweet spot with enough showers and enough privacy and security for your people and the conditions on the ground where you are. If you currently have NO showers for a lot of people, even if you can only supply one shower per week it will make the people healthier.
You will also want to establish some rules and best practices. If someone is very sick, you may want a separate shower for some cases that will have higher water quality and get cleaned more aggressively so you can try to keep them away from the shared showers so they don't spread disease.
I showered ONCE A MONTH for two years while homeless and that was a big improvement over cleaning up at sinks or at the beach. I talk about that some here and that post links to other stuff I have written about showers for homeless americans.
Tip: If water for showering is in short supply, keeping hair short helps people stay clean with less water usage.
Footnotes
This is NOT intended to be a "perfect" solution. It's intended to be a practical solution within reach of locals trying to DIY it.Remember:
- Progress, not perfection.
- The perfect is the enemy of the good.
- Sometimes, a 90-percent solution NOW is better than a 100-percent solution LATER.
You can EXPECT people to "get sick" for a while AFTER you improve sanitation and hygiene. It's a healing reaction, sort of like going through drug withdrawal. You feel worse for a while before it gets better.
If you suddenly have some kind of toilets and showers, etc. people will have a die-off reaction because they have fewer germs living on them and in them. It's probably NOTHING to be concerned about if it doesn't get real extreme and goes away in, say, two to six weeks.
If it continues too long, check to see if you messed something up and are making people actually sick.
If you have an issue like worms, a de-worming program implemented around the same time as improved santitation and water infrastructure could amplify the effectiveness of BOTH programs. De-worming programs are relatively cheap and effective with long-terms positive outcomes:
"The most surprising thing about the study in Kenya was the widespread impact," Kremer says. The program drove down infection rates for several kilometers around the schools, he says, and there were significant improvements in attendance for untreated students, in the treatment schools as well as in nearby schools not in the program.
And because the schoolchildren in their communities were dewormed in the late 1990s, infants in those communities faced lower rates of infection than they otherwise would have.
This has a direct bearing on poverty in a community, or a country. When hundreds of individuals in a community can be freed from infection, he explained, their improved health and education can help unlock the community’s development potential.Some potentially locally available resources for helping people feel better and get better during this transition:
- Cranberry juice helps clear urinary tract infections by making it harder for germs to stick to mucus membranes.
- Although MOST sodas are just sugar water with dye, SOME are actually mildly medicinal. This includes ginger ale made with real ginger (helps with nausea, helps kill viruses) and coke (coca cola, Diet Coke) which contains extract from the coca plant (helps with gut issues and respiratory issues).
- Tonic water contains small amounts of quinine, an antiparasitic.
- Alcohol can help kill stuff.
- Coffee contains caffeine which helps open airways, among other things.
B vitamins are mostly found in animal products, like beef, dairy products and seafood. Seaweed and mushrooms are vegetarian sources of B vitamins.
For lactose intolerant populations, bone broth can be used as a source of calcium. Seeds (poppy, sesame, celery, chia), sardines and salmon are other good sources of calcium.
Butter (clarify it if you are lactose intolerant), egg yolks and fats from meat (such as bacon or bacon drippings) are some appropriate sources of fats. Vegetarian sources of fats include coconut oil, palm oil and nuts (such as cashews, macadamias and almonds).
Clarified butter is butter heated over low heat to separate the milk solids and water from the fat. After the milk solids are removed, clarified butter stays liquid and can be safely used for up to two months without refrigeration. It is typically stored in a glass container.
Egg yolks are high in cholesterol which is essential for brain health. Anyone experiencing neurological issues during this time may need extra cholesterol, though 95 percent of the cholesterol in the brain is made in house starting with vitamin B5 as an essential building block.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no vegetarian sources of cholesterol. Though it can be hard to get enough B vitamins from vegetarian sources, there are plant-based sources of B vitamins and the body can build cholesterol in house from B5.