It’s just a norm

“I swear and I am going curse/You persistently/ for thousands years,/Because…/ Because I want / go to the toilet, But Russia has none.”

Sergei Yesenin put these words in the mouth of the character of his poem The Country of Villains. However, many readers may note that it is known that Ukraine is not Russia, and we had toilets long before they appeared in Russia. Yet most of The Day’s regional journalists may refute this statement: though we were the first, now we have an equal amount of routine problems.

On Novermber 19 we marked the International Day of Toilets. This original and quirky holiday was founded during an international conference in Singapore dedicated to the problem of toilets. But it seems that for Ukrainians this is nothing to laugh about. It does not seem funny to those who look for a public toilet in an oblast center (let alone in the raion centers). Nor is it funny for those who enter a WC in the Boryspil Airport after being to Munich. And it gets even less funny when it comes to the health of children studying in schools without internal toilets.

The delicacy of the “WC” topic becomes a secondary thing when we ask why in the 21st century, when Ukrainians are aspiring to join Europe, have they been unable to arrange their routine life?

Toilets are not the only issue. The cleanness of streets, transport vehicles, halls, and the quality of drinking water — surely, this mostly depends on the public utility services. Ukrainians’ attitude to the quality of their life, and resources providing this life, from the elementary “don’t litter” and “clean after yourself” and goes to the more complicated “turn off the faucet.” I can give a simple example. According to the website Eco­logy of Life, the average consumption of water per day for a Ukrainian city resident amounts to 325 liters (the highest level of water consumption is in the central and eastern oblasts), whereas in Europe’s cities this index is only 100-200 liters. Recently Zhytomyr’s water supply system broke. Since the yard where the accident took place is located in the suburbs, and the incident took place before the weekend, the water supply services came to the place only three days later. Meanwhile tons of water went up on the surface, affecting not only the houses, but also the arboretum of the forest research station.

I know about another example. Several years ago, Sofia Serebriakova from Kherson wrote that the World Bank decided to give a loan to Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and Science which totaled 86.5 million dollars, for secondary education. But before allotting the mo­ney it offered to study the situation in detail in order to have an idea of the situation. Six oblasts were selected as objects of research: Kherson, Zhytomyr, Zakarpattia, Lviv, Rivne, and Chernihiv. The schools aspiring for the participation in the program “Equal Access to High Quality Education” had to answer 300 questions. Even experienced people were impressed with what the survey of 187 schools in Ukraine’s pilot raions showed. I won’t retell how old the schools were on average, how poorly they were provided with textbooks and equipped with computers, in how many schools there was a practice of holding lessons for two different classes in a single room simultaneously. I will reveal only what is not publicized: the sanitation conditions. Most of schools had outdoors toilets. And only 29 percent of them had toilets with a sewage disposal system and running water.

The question of high-quality living conditions is simpler than the question of geopolitical choice. We all want to have drinkable water and clean toilets. But joining the EU will hardly insert European sanitary standards into our minds.