HesperianA Mozambique man leads sanitation efforts through song. Here’s an amazing New York Times profile of a young man who decided to use his talent in music to teach important sanitation lessons.
New York Times
October 25, 2008
The Saturday Profile
In Mozambique, Singing a Song of Sanitation and Hoping to Change Habits
By BARRY BEARAK
LICHINGA, Mozambique
FELICIANO DOS SANTOS is one of southern Africa’s leading musicians, and while he sings beautifully about the usual things — love and longing and sorrow — he is better known in the highland villages near here for catchy lyrics of a more peculiar sort, songs about going to the bathroom and washing your hands when you are done. In one fetching tune, sung in the tribal language of Nyanja, he exhorts people to boil water “so we can prevent diarrheal diseases.” In another, this one a pulsating rumba, he declares that “sanitation can change your life.”
Outhouse practices, of course, are not the ordinary intimacies described in pop songs, but then Mr. dos Santos is hardly an ordinary pop singer.
Though his band, Massukos, has toured in Europe and appeared before crowds in the thousands, he spends most of his time running a small charity called Estamos (“We are”) in his native Niassa, an isolated backwater near the Tanzanian border and among the poorest of Mozambique’s 11 provinces. The organization’s main goals are clean water and safe sanitation.
“Niassa is changing, and for the better, too, but what does this mean for poor people?” Mr. dos Santos said. “You still see people going two or three days without food. Many villages have no electricity, no clean water. Access to safe water is such a basic thing, and yet people don’t have it.”
Set in rolling hills among the lavender of jacarandas, the villages of Niassa may be strikingly picturesque, but the people are destitute, most living in windowless hovels made of mud, brick and thatch. They most often use the bush or open latrines as a toilet. Untreated waste sometimes befouls the groundwater.
MR. DOS SANTOS, 44, enters villages like a wandering troubadour. Recently, he arrived in Lussanhando, joined by Simão Ribeiro Fontes, another member of the band who works at Estamos. The two had come to oversee the installation of the village’s first ecologically safe latrine, a concrete slab that fits over a brick-lined pit three feet deep. So the song goes, “The slab is so good; the slab is easy to clean.”
As is customary, the two men attracted an instant crowd. Mr. Fontes strummed his guitar and led dozens of children in a song about washing hands. He then called out, “Who still goes to the toilet out in the bush?”
“We use latrines!” the children answered, knowing the right response. Mr. dos Santos shook his head. “No, they don’t, at least not yet,” he said. A lean, muscular man with a high-wattage smile, Mr. dos Santos was born in 1964 at the beginning of three decades of conflict, first as guerrillas battled for independence from their colonial overlords, the Portuguese, and then as political enemies squared off in a brutal civil war.
The way Mr. dos Santos tells his life story, he has a personal grudge against things unsanitary. As a toddler, he contracted polio, which is spread through contaminated food and water. The disease left him hobbled, with his right leg thin and misshapen, about four inches shorter than the left.
Some of his earliest memories are of shame, being unable to run and dance. To his family, polio was the result of a curse. They took Feliciano to a traditional healer, a witch doctor, who made ventilating slices in the boy’s skin, trying to purge the evil. When Feliciano was 8, his father was killed in a hunting accident and the family moved from the village of Macula to Lichinga, the provincial capital, where his mother found work as a maid in a hospital.
“She let me stay in school, and I worked very hard because I felt inferior,” Mr. dos Santos said. “When people see someone with a physical problem, they assume you also have a problem in your head.”
As a teenager who was self-conscious of his own lopsidedness, he began strapping cardboard beneath his shorter leg to even out the height. At age 16 or 17, he went to Maputo, Mozambique’s capital, where he finally obtained a properly fitted extension for his deformed limb. Just as fatefully, he returned from that trip with a battered old guitar. Mr. dos Santos had always loved music, the rapid-fire delivery of sungura, the steady cadence of reggae. His tastes traced a map of the world, from Ismael Lo in Senegal to Bob Marley in Jamaica to Stevie Wonder in the United States. Among the first tunes he taught himself were “Hey Jude” by The Beatles and “Get Down on It” by Kool & the Gang.
He became a musician, though some considered that disreputable. His wife’s uncle once ordered him from the house, saying he was unfit to be a husband. How could a guitar player with a bum leg be an adequate provider?
But by the postwar years of the mid-1990s, Mr. dos Santos was not only earning a decent wage, but also accruing a modicum of fame.
He had a job at Radio Mozambique, reading the news, producing shows and talking about social issues. In 1994, he started Massukos and the band became increasingly popular, transforming melodies familiar in the villages of Niassa into marketable pop music. He worked with organizations like Unicef and the International Rescue Committee on sanitation projects.
In 1996, Mr. dos Santos and several others established Estamos, which has since installed nearly 5,000 improved latrines and expanded into the delivery of services to AIDS patients. The work, like the music, has not gone unrecognized. In April, Mr. dos Santos was one of seven grass-roots activists to win a $150,000 Goldman Environmental Prize, awards given annually in San Francisco. He already has spent some of the cash on latrines.
“The prize was good for me but also good for Niassa,” Mr. dos Santos said. “People don’t think good things ever come from a poor place like Niassa.”
Massukos has released two CDs that have sold well internationally. The songs about sanitation are not on the albums, but the recorded compositions, sung mostly in tribal languages, do carry social themes — a widow protesting her eviction from the family household, a young boy crying out because he has been abandoned.
One of the best-known songs is simply called “Niassa.” The words go: “I am not embarrassed that you are poor like this. Other people say, ‘I’ll never go back to Niassa. Why go back?’ But we are here.”
STILL here, yes. But Mr. dos Santos also confesses to being exhausted. Estamos now has more than 30 employees and an annual budget of nearly $1 million.
“I need a rest,” he said as he sat under the dim glow of a naked light bulb in his small office. “I wish I could go fishing at a lake for about a month.”
The work can be irritating, he said, involving the tedious writing of grant proposals and the incessant cajoling of government officials.
Perhaps if you build a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door. But that is not necessarily true of toilets in remote villages. Some people install the latrines and then never use them, he said; some recipients sell the cement slabs.
And then there is the simple enormousness of the task. Less than 40 percent of Mozambique’s population has access to safe water, less than half to improved sanitation, according to the United Nations.
“You can sing forever about washing hands but you still need to provide the clean water,” Mr. dos Santos said.
“But I’ll keep going,” he finally concluded, a little embarrassed by his own complaining. “I know myself and I will not leave.”
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