With an Indian background, I can tell you that it's sad to see people defecating on the side of railway tracks... The fact is that in western nations people do take for granted clean bathrooms, whereas when we travel in India, we rely on hotels or homes of friends/relatives, for relief. And this is the country that 4000 yrs ago had the world's first sewage system! So many taboos,phobias wrapped around this so imperative need.... must say that the Creator could have had us excrete out like plants! Or, thinking now like a believer,there must be a REASON for this messy,stinky way... any ideas?!

Efficiency. Our bodies are designed for operation powered by fuels (meat, fat, vegatables, etc) that produce waste.

Sure, plants don't seem to produce much waste. But they don't have anything like the systems our bodies have to operate.

Yet the human body is'nt efficient enough to totally assimilate what is ingested or maybe what is excreted does have a definite purpose.... for ex, I think in China long back, "night soil" was a valuable fertilizer?

One must always remember that all water is recycled water, especially if you live downstream of another town. Where do you think the effluent of a wastewater treatment plant is discharged to? New Orleans drinks the most recycled water along the Mississippi.

I remember watching a program where the NGO was trying to help a 3rd world village cut down on water based diseases by teaching the women and children to dig a latrine and not drop and squat near the fields. Apparently the NGOs determined that the men were too stubborn to teach and had to rely on the women to break the cycle.

You say, "thinking like a believer." Believer in what? There are many things about our bodies that make problems for us and shouldn't, were we actually designed by a decent engineer--the curvature of our spine, the fact our knees bend forward instead of back, our tailbones, our appendices, the size of our natal heads relative to the size of the birth canal... None of these make "design sense" on an individual level, but there are many more that don't make "design sense" on a civilizational level, like this one. Most of our fecal matter is fiber, or cellulose, matter we are unable to use and break down. Many bacteria, such as those that live in ruminant GI tracts, are capable of doing so. Why don't we have them in us? We'd make a lot less feces if we did. But it's not the feces that's the problem, per se: it's the pathogens IN the feces. These pathogens are not "designed" with a better human life in mind either. They exist because nature selects for their transmission in sewer-free, population-dense societies. Install sewers, and they nearly vanish. So perhaps, whether you are a "believer" in an intelligent designer or you understand the process of evolution, your challenge is the same: how can we overcome our biology through decent and just human behavior? Stop buying bottled water and support the construction of sewers around the world.

(Hmmm...I swear I had paragraphs there. Sorry.)

madmaya:

Yet the human body is'nt efficient enough to totally assimilate what is ingested or maybe what is excreted does have a definite purpose.... for ex, I think in China long back, "night soil" was a valuable fertilizer?

Not so long back. As recently as the 80's, I was in a chinese village where the effluence is hauled away by the "night gentleman". All the crap is taken to a boat, and eventually it is sold back to the farmers as fertilizer.

'All the crap is taken to a boat, and eventually it is sold back to the farmers as fertilizer.'

when you see a 40lb bag of 'milagornite' sp? at your local home store, it is processed human waste that is obtained from municipal waste water plants. works pretty good too for shrubs, trees, flowers and veggies. i always keep a bag around.

What I want to know is, how stupid do you have to be not to realize that you should be digging holes in the ground to deal with waste? Cats understand this. So, these populations have less intelligence than a cat. And you want to help them because. . . . ?