Eight hours without going to the toilet

There is no water, the toilet bowls are full, it smells and the doors are broken. The girls have it the worst.

By Natalia Lopez Moya (14ymedio)

HAVANA TIMES – It is time to prepare school supplies, to stand in long lines to buy the uniforms that students will wear to school in September, but also to look for solutions to alleviate one of the most serious problems facing Cuban schools: the lack of hygiene and safety in the bathrooms. Girls are the worst affected.

“I prepare two bottles of water for her, one to drink and one to wash her hands with when she goes to the bathroom, but she never uses them,” Dagmara, the mother of a teenager who goes to elementary school in Old Havana, told 14ymedio. The girl, who will start ninth grade in a few days, just had a kidney infection that seems to be related to her frequent failure to urinate at school.

“When she was taking her final exams in eighth grade, she developed a high fever and chills,” she explains. “The doctor told us she would need antibiotics and that she seemed to spend a lot of time without drinking water or urinating.” Diannis, her name has been changed for this story, stays in the classroom for more than eight hours a day without going near the toilets. “It smells very bad in there and the doors to the stalls are broken.”

Diannis describes the bathroom as a place best avoided. “The sinks have no water, the toilets are almost always full because there is no way to flush them, sometimes people do their business outside the stalls because they don’t want to go in, and to top it all off, the doors are broken or have long since disappeared, so there is no privacy.”

“When I have my period, I don’t go to school. I spend the whole week at home because I don’t have the opportunity to change and wash,” she admits. “I don’t go to school once a month and several of my friends do too. The teachers know what it’s about and they don’t tell us because it’s very hard to have your period at school. You can’t even wash your hands after changing your sanitary pad.”

The directors of the secondary school where Diannis goes are familiar with the problem. At every parents’ evening, the teachers ask for help cleaning the toilets. “One or two of us come forward, we go, we clean thoroughly and a month later everything is as always: dirty,” admits Dagmara. “One time my husband and I went and even repaired the door of a cubicle and put a lock and key on it so that the boys in our daughter’s class could use it. Shortly afterwards, we found out that this toilet was now reserved for ‘urban visits’ by the Ministry of Education and the students could no longer use it.”

The lack of cleaning staff due to low wages and harsh working conditions also contributes to the disastrous situation in school toilets. In addition, the toilets are not only dirty, but also lack toilet paper, water and soap, lack containers for disposing of sanitary towels, are poorly lit, poorly signposted and are often unsafe.

“I have a younger daughter who is now in primary school and has already learned from her sister that she is not allowed to use the school toilet,” complains Dagmara. “I can’t give her a portable toilet, but she also can’t come to our house every time she needs to go to the toilet because there is a very busy road in between and it would be dangerous. We don’t know what to do and nobody seems to care.”

Nevertheless, the issue has gained great prominence in campaigns by international organizations such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). “Hygiene is our right” promotes one of its initiatives, which aims to “ensure menstrual hygiene, handwashing and health habits for girls, boys and adolescents in school, encourage them to participate in classes and promote their right to health.”

“We are measured by other parameters, such as class attendance, grades, number of students who pass the exam, but it is true that the toilet issue is a no-man’s land, it is not subject to much control,” admits a teacher at a primary school in the Havana neighborhood of El Cerro, near Calle Infanta. The premises where she teaches, a former teacher training center, originally had large areas for toilets.

“There are many problems with blockages, so we have had to close some toilets. At the moment the water does not come every day and when September begins and the students are already in the classrooms, the situation will get even worse,” warns the woman, who recently joined the brigades trying to prepare the schools for the upcoming start of the school year. “They have not even given us detergent, we do not even have brooms,” she laments.

For UNICEF, “access to water, sanitation and hygiene is essential to ensure the health of students,” but a large proportion of Cuban schools are struggling with supplies, with problems ranging from damaged pipes to occasional breakages that lack the resources or staff to fix. “The toilets are clogged, they don’t drain properly and the sinks are stolen,” is how the teacher describes the situation at her school.

“I have children who can bring water from home to wash their hands, wet wipes and other supplies to maintain their hygiene. But I have others who come to school to do their business because they don’t even have a latrine at home, because they live in temporary shelters or on properties with a shared toilet for many people. What can I say to these children when they ask me to let them go to the toilet and I know what situation they will find?”

In El Cotorro, 42-year-old Yuri has spoken several times with the director of the secondary school where her son goes. “The bathroom is not safe, the windows face the street and they have already caught some men watching the children. My son began to avoid the school. He didn’t tell me anything, but after I asked him for a long time, he confessed to me that he is afraid to go to the bathroom because adults who come from elsewhere go there or stay there.”

“A year ago, two boys who were home from school went into this toilet and started fighting with knives in the middle of the children. Nobody separated them and the incident was not even reported to the police, but my son saw it and since then he does not want to go near this place, which does not even have doors,” she adds.

“Where there used to be toilets, there is now a hole in the ground where they have to urinate, but every time I bring up the subject, they tell me that they are boys and that it doesn’t matter,” complains the father. “If they get sick one day, they can’t go to school that day or they have to go home and miss the rest of the lessons.”

In the home of twins Paula and Natalia, the grandmother, who has played the role of mother and father since the teenagers’ parents left for Mexico via Managua to reach the United States, is unequivocal in her warnings: “You don’t go to the bathroom at school. If it’s urgent, you tell the teacher to send you home.”

Soon, girls’ emergencies will probably increase when they get their periods. They will miss classes, stop listening to the math teacher when he explains fractions and the physics teacher when he explains the forces acting on certain objects. All this lost knowledge will come at the expense of the toilets in the classrooms, those unsafe and dirty places.

Translated by Translating Cuba.

Read more from Cuba in the Havana Times here.