Imagine going to the toilet with an audience looking on.
Embarrassing doesn’t do justice to the way most of us would feel about the prospect.
But that is what 17-year-old Leonardo and his family have to contend with.
`I’ve never had a shower except from a bucket and I’ve never had a toilet,’ says Leonardo, who lives in a rural area of Pernambuco state in north-east Brazil.
Answering the call of nature means a dash into the woods but that comes with the undignified prospect of being seen by neighbours.
Leonardo outlines the alternative: `We have to hold on till night so the neighbours aren’t around to look.’
Yet even that is risky as there’s the danger of being bitten by snakes, scorpions or wild dogs.
Leonardo does the ground work for a new toilet and bathroom. Picture: Richard Hanson/Tearfund
However all that is to change for Leonardo and his family as Tearfund partner Diaconia is providing them, among others, with a bathroom and toilet for the first time.
Leonardo describes the provision of a toilet as a blessing yet it is one that 2.6 billion people worldwide don’t have.
Instead they are condemned to live in often unpleasant and smelly environments, coping with the attendant lack of dignity that comes with going to the toilet in an all too often public way.
The sheer scale of the problem is why sanitation is the focus of World Water Day on Saturday 22 March.
You are likely to hear a lot about toilets and disposing of human waste in 2008 as it is the UN’s Year of Sanitation.
The fact such a year has been designated reflects the massive need for progress on an issue that is closely linked to health.
Scandal
Poor sanitation, or a complete lack of it, is a major factor behind the prevalence of diarrhoea which annually claims the lives of 1.8 million children.
Governments have promised to halve the number of people without access to sanitation by 2015 but progress is slow.
So slow that at current rates sub-Saharan Africa won’t meet the target till 2076.
Laura Webster, Tearfund’s senior policy officer on water and sanitation, said, `Sanitation is an issue that has been sidelined by policy makers for too long.
`We need a Global Action Plan, with clear mechanisms for tracking progress, and a commitment that no country’s plan for improving sanitation will go unfunded by donors.
`This sanitation scandal cannot be ignored any longer.’