Talking Openly About Open Defecation & Christianity

“So what does Christianity have to do with the defecation problems of the world?”

That’s a question posed in Gospel for Asia (GFA) special report “Saving Lives at Risk from Open Defecation: Using Outdoor Toilets to Improve Sanitation.”

The report, written by bestselling author and speaker Karen Burton Mains, takes an in-depth—and, at times, personal—view concerning open defecation problems around the world and those specific to Asia.

In this part of the slums in Asia, many people live in close proximity to unhygienic surroundings—lacking facilities like toilets and proper drainage.

Here’s an excerpt:

Talking Openly About Open Defecation

Another key dilemma in this discussion—open defecation, hardly a dinner-table topic or a mission committee agenda item—is the fact that accessibility to toilets does not always indicate usage. Changing habits is mostly a matter of changing mindsets in the face of the stranglehold of deeply entrenched beliefs.

Elizabeth Royte, in a comprehensive August 2017 National Geographic Magazine article, reports visiting Parameswaran Iyer, India’s secretary of drinking water and sanitation, in 2016. A hand-numbered sign on his wall tracks progress.

“You see that?” he asks. “One hundred thousand is the number of villages that are ODF today.” (ODF is the acronym for open defecation free).

Royte reports working the internal math: “Just 540,000 to go, I note; three years before Modi’s deadline.”

Other players, including the World Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (with $40 million dollars in prize money allocated toward innovative approaches to new toilet technologies), hundreds of concerned social entrepreneurs, engineers with altruistic motivations, East Asian water initiatives, and countless faith-based organizations are tackling the seemingly intractable worldwide dilemma of toilets, sanitation systems and sullied water.

What drives all this magnitude of interest, field research, consortiums and consultations on sanitation/water projects, awarding of grants and money prizes? Disease—plain and simple. Both waterborne and airborne. Some 1.5 million people die globally each year from polluted water diseases alone.

Facing the Facts about Toilets

Elizabeth Royte, who is a sanitation expert traveling widely and reporting extensively, summarizes that “Indian PM Modi aims to build more than 100 million new toilets in rural areas alone by 2019.” But she notes that “deep-seated attitudes may present an even bigger barrier to improving sanitation than a lack of pipes and pits.”

That being said, let’s first look at the data regarding the state of toilets and open defecation in Asia. Then let’s examine what development organizations, sanitation technologies and mission groups, namely Gospel for Asia (GFA), are attempting in order to help Asia become ODF.


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