The other WTO

I imag­ined a joke about some­one telling another per­son that he works at the WTO, and the other per­son asks, “Wow, how long have you been in Geneva?”, and the first per­son asks back, “What do you mean, Geneva? I work in Toa Payoh.”

Peo­ple laugh at our obses­sion with toi­lets — and how as a nation, we made all our pub­lic toi­lets flush them­selves because we couldn’t be trusted to flush them, and now we don’t have to flush them so often because water is scarce, and how we actu­ally have a national con­test to see who has the clean­est toilets.

Hav­ing cog­i­tated on this for a bit (on the toi­let no less), I have realised that it really is no laugh­ing mat­ter. Good san­i­ta­tion means less dis­ease, and we should be spread­ing the word about effi­cient waste management.

Lack of pub­lic action and edu­ca­tion has led to peo­ple defa­cat­ing on street cor­ners in Dhaka because of a lack of pub­lic toi­lets. And you really should teach some peo­ple that not every­thing can be flushed.

So, don’t laugh, and be proud of the fact that Sin­ga­pore hosts the World Toi­let Sum­mit (whose logo looks sus­pi­ciously like Stan­dard Chartered’s), which was held last Decem­ber. And the next time some­one says s/he works at the WTO, ask him/her how things are in Toa Payoh.