Measuring ‘progress’ in poor countries

By Joel Thurtell

I know I’m paying too much for things that only a few years ago I’d have considered luxuries, prestige purchases that drained my savings without contributing lasting good to our household.

Things like cell phones, and  even high-speed Internet connections.

Who’d have imagined in the 1980s that we’d come to think of these little but costly things as necessities of life?

The question took on new relevance for me a few days ago when a friend and former Togo Peace Corps volunteer told me about her return to the little West African country a couple years ago. She was a health educator in Togo in the early seventies, when I was in the Peace Corps working on school and well construction projects.

Forty or so years later, she made her return visit. Despite decades out of touch, she was recognized by one person in Togo and soon, lots of old friends and acquaintances were showing up to greet her.

How’d they get the word?

Not from talking drums.

Cell phones.

It baffles me. Here am I, pondering why I spend so much of my discretionary income on cell phones and Internet doo-dads. But in Togo, it’s hard to figure where that discretionary income comes from.

In Togo, according to the World Bank, “In 2001, per capita household consumption (in constant 1995 US dollars) was $299. Household consumption includes expenditures of individuals, households, and nongovernmental organizations on goods and services, excluding purchases of dwellings…It was estimated that in 1989 about 32% of the population had incomes below the poverty line.”

When I was in Togo in the early seventies, the per capita income was estimated at $300.

In terms of income, nothing has changed.

In the seventies, cash was so rare that civil servants went months without pay checks.

Barter was a mainstay of local markets.

If per capita consumption now is no different than it was in the seventies, how are people paying for cell phones?

Or are the cell phones part of some government giveaway?

I have another question: Is cell phone usage a good measure of progress in Togo and other poor countries?

In our time there, my wife was a health educator, and part of her job was trying to build latrines and then finding ways to persuade people to use them.

The Peace Corps goal was to convince people to do their duty in outhouses rather than ambling up to some secluded knoll to squat, often followed by a troop of pigs who promptly ate the humans’ leavings. We westerners knew that trichinosis, tape worm and other parasites were transmitted back and forth between swine and humans. We knew that germs from human waste caused all kinds of illnesses. But it wasn’t obvious to many Togolese. Trying to educate people about this critical cause-and-effect relationship frustrated many a health educator.

In theory, the schools we were building would be places where kids could learn why it’s important to wash hands after going to the bathroom, for instance, and why leaving piles in open fields was an invitation to disease. In practice, these were hard concepts to teach, because nobody could see the germs that were carried by Madame la Mouche, aka the fly, as well as by unwashed hands.

And oh, by the way, where was the water coming from if somebody did want to wash hands? We got our water from the same large-mouthed wells as our neighbors. But we filtered and boiled our water before drinking and cooking with it. Still, we used water straight from the well for washing our bodies. The really clean water seemed too precious, too hard-worked-for, to waste by pouring it over ourselves.

Most people had no electrical power. Villages were totally without electricity. Thus, electric pumps were out of the question. So many things that we take for granted as basics of life were simply impossible because there was no source of power.

Except in Lome, the capital, where I first encountered an open sewer, there were no municipal or any other kind of sewer systems. For that matter, while the market town and administrative center where we lived in northern Togo had a limited supply of public water, it consisted of pumps that occasionally sent water to hydrants where people could fill buckets if they were alert to the capricious schedule of the public water agency. Mostly, people relied on those big holes in the ground that we referred to as “wells” and that readily accepted errant dogs, goats and whatever might drop in and rot.

Our three-room adobe house with zinc roof had a detached combination privy and shower. A wall separated the two chambers. The privy was simply a hole in the ground, with no seat. You didn’t want a stool, because scorpions like to hang out in places like that. The shower was just a tiny room where you took a bucket of murky gray well water and half a squash, or calabash, which you dipped into the bucket to wet yourself and later rinse off soap.

So, what I want to know is, how are people paying for those cell phones from their $299-a-year?

My last visit to Togo was in 1990. I’ll be sending my questions to people who’ve been there more recently.

I’d like to know, for instance, if anyone has figured out how to purify the water villagers hoist up in buckets from the well I helped them dig back in 1973.

My biggest question, though, is not how many people use cell phones.

I’d like to know where, in “modern” Togo, do people poop?

Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com