Dear Readers
Today’s story literally drags us down into the gutter… and then some… I have this piece by reporter Stanislav Leshchenko. The backstory is this, and this is a fact: The people in Ukraine have been told by their media (and they believe it, because they only have one media, and one point of view allowed), that they are much richer and better off than Russians; that Russians are so poor they have no indoor plumbing and have never seen a toilet. A persistent meme in the war-propaganda presented to Ukrainians is that of Russian soldiers stealing toilet seats and even whole toilets. First of all, these barbarians had never seen a proper toilet in their lives; their first question was “What is this thing?” and then, on learning what it is, they were, like, “I have to have this!” And then loot and rampage.
Given this backstory, the Russian MSM is enjoying, with Schadenfreude, this news about the Lithuanian toilet situation. Apparently the Lithuanian government, at the behest of the EU (in the interests of a cleaner environment) has decided to crack down on the nation’s habitual use of outdoor toilets.
This is doubly funny because Vilnius regards itself as the center of European values and of world civilization as a whole. Lithuanian emissaries played a huge rule in fomenting the 2014 Maidan, and continue to poke at Russia whenever possible. They are super-supportive of the current Ukrainian government and unleash an endless stream of hate speech against Russia. Given this, who can blame the Russians for teasing them about their toilets?
Full disclosure: I have never been to Lithuania myself. I did visit Latvia, back in the day; and found it quite charming and modern. Having said that, my sole experience was the capital city of Riga, a nice hotel, great restaurants, etc. I didn’t get a chance to really get out there in the boondocks; and one has to understand that the Baltic nations are a rural lot, primarily. From what I understand, it’s mostly farms and villages.
According to the reporter, the EU has been trying, for many years, to get Lithuania to reform its sanitary situation. Indoor toilets are not always an option out in the boondocks. According to statistics, almost a third of the Lith population has no indoor toilets, the type that are hooked up to a functioning sewer system. Thus, many Liths have no choice except to use the type of outdoor toilet which is called a sortir.
Clean Up Your Act!
In 2017 the Euro-Commission even threatened to fine Lithuania if they failed to solve this problem in a timely fashion. (The issue is one of a clean environment for all Europeans who have to share that part of the continent together.) The bureaucrats in Brussels noted that only 80% of the Lith population receive their water from taps. An even smaller number (72%) have water taps that are hooked up to a central source of water. (As opposed to wells?) This number is supposed to be 98% to be compliant as a member of the European Union. Functionaries of the Euro-Commission worry that the Lithuanians, forced to satisfy their needs in rural outhouses, are polluting the environment. The problem would be mitigated if they were to “process” their own waste in a proper fashion — but they don’t. Furthermore, many of these outhouses are downright dangerous, they are rickety, and there have been cases where people were injured, or even killed when the things collapsed on them, while they were inside.
According to EU standards, in any populated area containing more than 2000 people, there should be a centralized water system with sewer canals. Lilthuanian railroad stations are particularly nasty, having what are essentially two porto-potties labelled M and F. The EU would like to see these replaced with proper bathrooms, male bathrooms with urinals, for example; and all bathrooms with sinks and washing stations, like in truly civilized countries. Modern bathrooms are also required to be “handicapped accessible”, as one sees in international airports, for example. Lithuanian journalists note that even the porto-potties are not always used: Liths are famous for doing it “around the corner”, so to speak.
Towards the end of 2018 it became apparent that the Lithuanians had done nothing to correct these issues, about which they were continuously nagged. At which point the Euro-Commission threatened to find the nation 700,000 Euros. Statistics showed, at that time, that 13% of the population lived in houses without an indoor toilet. And 12% lived in a house without an indoor bath or shower. However, by the end of 2021 that number had improved and was now 7.6%. The goal, though, is to get it down to zero. Or at least replace the outhouses with proper septic systems, if canalization is not possible in a certain locality.
Some officials in the Lithuanian government have tried to shift the blame onto the population themselves; they claimed that the water infrastructure had been provided to residents who stubbornly refused to make use of it. For example, Antanas Bubnelis, who heads the largest water company in the capital city Vilnius, declared the following, apparently trying to shift the blame from himself to ordinary residents: “A part of the population are just used to living in a house without water and a sewage pipe; either that, or they don’t want to invest in the improvement of their own lives. They take water from the street pipes (из колонок) – and use outhouses instead of toilets.”
Other investigative journalists have noted the same issues, but they say that a lot of people just don’t have the money to hook up to the water supply, even when it is offered. So that maybe Bubnelis is just blaming the victims, for their own poverty.
The Bigger Picture
In other words, the actual issue is not one of hygiene, nor laziness, nor rural stubbornness. It’s the issue of poverty. From the moment it seceded from the USSR, Lithuania started losing people. In 1991 it had over 3.7 million people. In 2022 it has only 2.2 milion. Many villages became completely depopulated, or are populated with mainly elderly people and pensioners. Their children and grandchildren long ago left for greener pastures in the broader EU. The pensioners live on modest incomes and maybe can’t afford modern plumbing.
In all of the EU the list of top nations for percentage lacking in door toilets hooked up to the sewer system: Romania takes the lead (22.8%), followed by Bulgaria (13.2%), then Latvia (8%), then Lithuania (7.6%).
In conclusion: Although the situation is gradually improving, Lithuania (and certain other EU countries) still have a long way to go, before they can be considered Euro-compliant with their toiletry and waste-processing systems. The governments need to deal with this situation in a rational manner and not try to scare the population with fines, or blaming them for their own poverty.
Awful Avalanche 
I kind of suspect that most of those without full plumbing and toilets in Lithuania are the Russia speakers who get such bad treatment. I can’t see the Water Board investing in facilities for Russian villages.
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In defense of the Russian soldiers who swiped toilet seats: I can testify from experience that this is a problem in Russia. In Novosibirsk, the Philharmonia Hall is elegant and beautiful until you go to the ladies’ room, where there are no toilets, but holes in the floor “for your convenience.” The toilets in the former Pioneer camp where I was living had no seats. And don’t get me started on Russian toilet paper, which is dispensed one piece at a time by the babushka who sits outside the facilities at the Novosibirsk Zoo!
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Susan,
someone once suggested to me, their creation was related to a venereal disease hysteria.
but holes in the floor “for your convenience.”
Are you familiar with the French Squatt toilets? You indeed have to squat. Admittedly quite a challenge for the uninitiated user. 😉
Squat toilets are used all over the world, but are particularly common in some Asian and African nations, as well as in some Muslim countries. In many of those countries, anal cleansing with water is also the cultural norm and easier to perform than with toilets used in a sitting position. They are also occasionally found in some European and South American countries. Squat toilets are regarded as traditional by many, and are being phased out in favour of sitting toilets or even high-tech sitting toilets.
The didn’t always look as clean as the one above. But toilets can get quite a disaster if there are too many people using it anywhere.
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Haha! I had some experiences too in parts of Russia. Maybe not so much with “holes in the floor”, but I did see some toilets that were fully functional and hooked up to pipes, only without actual seats.
From what I can see, the Japanese are the most advanced people in the world when it comes to personal hygiene. Maybe Western Europe. America is okay, but I wouldn’t say the most advanced in the world. All Americans have proper toilets, but most have never seen a bidet, for example.
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An even smaller number (72%) have water taps that are hooked up to a central source of water. (As opposed to wells?)
No, I take it water usually comes in buckets. Taps are for more costly liquids – vodka perhaps? Just a thought!
Lilthuanian railroad stations are particularly nasty, having what are essentially two porto-potties labelled M and F.
Surely the real problem is that the Lithuanians are not sufficiently woke for EU requirements. Two portacabins labelled M and F is not enough, they should have at least 8 portacabins each labelled for a different sex, such as M, F, N, B, … (no idea what the other labels would be as I am no expert on this woke thingy, but you get the message.)
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America is more woke. Pre-covid when I got to travel out West (like Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, other amazing places), the porto-potties in the National Parks were all Unisex.
They were kind of smelly, but doable, at least they had toilet paper and hand sanitizer.
I should probably mention at this point that I am a HUGE germophobe, but what can you do, if you like to travel, then you have to learn to cope with whatever you encounter!
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Someone who worked at Buckingham Palace mentioned that apparently someone tried to steal a royal toilet seat from there as a souvenir. Shame about Lithuania, many water sanitation expert centres are in Europe including UN. Also, the private sector busy devising unsustainable schemes that don’t help. Like you say, passing the problem onto the residents doesn’t fix it.
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I know! I mean, if they really want to fix the problem, then they need to invest money and build the proper systems. It seems to me like having clean water and indoor plumbing should be classified as a human right. Then governments should strive to achieve and show metrics proving that they are reaching their targets.
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There’s a UN goal with some reporting https://www.unwater.org/publication_categories/sdg6-progress-reports/ which is off target globally. We are getting worse in the UK with massive increase in sewage due to Tories changing regulations post Brexit. Russia has a water centre of excellence at one of their universities, can’t remember which one. I assume that Lithuania like Ukraine has been given EU funding even if not directly via Commission such as uni research projects / partnerships. I don’t know how corrupt Lithuania is, Ukraine obviously is – one of most common factors in water projects is corruption.
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Nicola: you had an amusing misspelling in your comment (“pist Brexit”) instead of “post Brexit”.
I hope you don’t mind that I fixed it in the editor.
(I normally don’t edit comments, except if an obvious misspelling But maybe you meant it as a pun?)
🙂
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Freudian typing definitely 😃
I saw it but couldn’t edit, thank you very much
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Unfortunately wordpress does not have a feature which allows commenters to edit their own comments. I don’t know why. Maybe because I have the cheapo freebie version of wordpress (?)
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If I find out the answer, will let you know
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I shouldn’t, I suppose, but I have share a joke from a couple decades ago (maybe things have changed since) that was in a collection of jokes by someone who took a trip to Guatemala:
Q: What do they call a dry patch of sidewalk in Guatemala?
A: A great place to p*ss.
From the same source, not relevant here, but…
Q: What do they call a one-lane road in Guatemala?
A: They call it a two-lane road.
Actually there was one about toilet seats, I think, but I’m not sure how it goes.
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Those kind of jokes are universal, I heard a lot of ones about Mexico as well, but I’m not going to repeat them!
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Who needs indoor showers in Lithuania — they’d almost certainly have saunas!
As for toilets, here you’ve gone and gotten me started. It’s been mentioned here that squat toilets are common in Asia. Got that right! I took a bicycle tour across parts of Cambodia and Thailand in 2017 and part of our orientation was about how to use them. Not easy, and bring-yer-own “poo tickets” (one of my favourite Aussie colloquialisms, meaning “TP”). There’s usually a little bucket with water, or a hose attached to pressurised H2O if you’re lucky. They take the role of the bidet. I was not skilled enough to use those without making a big splash, so I carried my own arse-wipes.
It’s not just in undeveloped countries, either. One time in Paris, I went to the WC (the French use that abbreviation in places) at a nice cafe off the Rue Rivoli, not far from Louvre. Not a slummy spot at all! The toilets were down a couple flights of stairs, in a building that had been there since the 1700s, I’m sure. Same sort of hole in the floor to do the doo in. At least they had toilet paper. I reckon they left it that way because to install a conventional toilet facility deep down in a heritage building would have been ruinously expensive.
And don’t knock outdoor toilets! I hang out with people on the Doomer end of the ideological scale and read blogs written by others with that mindset. We can see that the “Limits To Growth” dynamic that the Club of Rome wrote about in 1972 are going to bite industrial society in the bum (pun intended) during this century. (And I don’t mean in the later 2000s, either.) Westie society’s massive effort to make our wastes wash away unseen wastes a lot of potential fertiliser. We are stripping the soil of nutrients and flushing them out to sea. Composting toilets, where you excrete into sawdust that later gets spread on fields, for example, are one way of recapturing the nitrogen, phosphorus, etc that flows away. Obviously not feasible in cities. I can’t see it working in the 17-storey apartment block where I live. And a high concentration of people using septic tanks is going to leach bacteria into waterways.
But the European Commission should not necessarily dunk on natural dumping. As The Collapse unfolds, there’s going to be a lot more outdoor toileting in the future. For those who make it through the Dieoff Bottleneck, that is…
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Oh, I didn’t even think of saunas, of course they have them! I mean, they were even invented in that part of the world.
On human bio-waste, I read some people saying it should be used for something productive, but then I read somewhere else that it doesn’t make good fertilizer. Too nasty or something, I don’t know. I also read that dog poo is not particularly conducive to making plants grow.
I still have faith in Science (with a capital S), I read that scientists are developing bacteria that can clean up just about any spills or nasty stuff. I hope it’s true. As a germophobe myself, I would love to live in a completely spotless planet!
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On human bio-waste, I read some people saying it should be used for something productive
There is already enough bio-waste from animals for agriculture. … Especially bigger farms already use resellers for their stuff, I once learned. 😉
But via the toilet we are entering the larger field of waste water treatment here, the Sewage Treatment Plant. … Not too long ago I discovered a citizen initiative here in Cologne who last year after a year long campaign managed to force the local energy provider to make sure it will contribute bio-gas produced from the remnants of those sewage plants to its gas mix.
I agree the use of bacteria occasionally looks quite promising even in fields were you do not at all expect it.
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I routinely read some popular science magazines, to try to keep up with stuff. Apparently some scientists are even developing bacteria that could eat plastics and break them down, once and for all. Wouldn’t that be something? (I worry about plastic pollution a lot.)
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Moon is right about the problems with “humanure” (as it’s sometimes called.) It’s too “hot” in a biological sense and has to be left to decompose for a while before being spread on fields. The most toxic bacteria die off, various substances such as nitrogen combine with oxygen so they’re biologically available to plants, etc. And what comes through the sewer pipes is often contaminated with other chemicals that are flushed, often by businesses who crap out on doing the (expensive) right thing with their wastes. So it’s not a fool-proof thing.
As for the bacteria that dissolve plastics, be careful with what you wish for! Who knows what those things might devour? “I’m sorry, Mr. Yalensis, we’re going to have to replace all the water pipes in your house with nice safe lead ones because you’ve developed a nasty infection with the HB-952.1 bacterium and the system is full of holes. That’ll be $10,395, please.”
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That’s a good point about the plastics. I see a possible horror film in the making (or maybe an episode of Doctor Who), where all the stuff we routinely use in our lives, suddenly starts to melt because it got infected. No, not my plastic spoon set, not my favorite mixing bowl – aaaarrrghh!
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You are absolutely right that some real estate owners in Paris don’t want to go through bureaucratic paperwork to get simply water and sewage installed in historical buildings. But they are an exception since most of these places were bourgeois houses whose owners didn’t care about standards and got the work done.
One thing that should be mentioned is that cafés often have toilet rooms in the basement with all commodities and the lady working there gets a minimum wage completed by forced donations from users. These “peepee ladies” (dame pipi) as they are often called can make quite a good salary since they usually ask for one or two euros per customer (with the implicit threat that she wouldn’t keep the toilets so clean if she wasn’t satisfied with her income). I remember being in 1997 almost kicked out and unable to empty my bladder because I had no French coins but only Italian ones and had to negotiate with the waiter upstairs to get 10 francs (1,5 euros nowadays, almost 25% of the cost of a beer) so that the lady let me in… the funniest was she commented on the money customers gave her such as saying “you are stingy, I’m sure you are already divorced twice”.. typically Parisienne..
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Everybody knows Russia is the paragon of barbarism and Ukraine the helmet of civilization. That’s probably why Russia bankrupt economy can still send satellites or have hypersonic missiles..because they didn’t invest nor invent toilets lol
You can get everything logical except that Lithuanians don’t have enough toilets nor never product rockets nor kinzhal….
This whole story about an Ukrainian family and this russian officer discovering toilets shows the real state of media in the west. I suggest these journos to take a trip to yakutia and see how one can be comfortable doing the job by -65°C in Russian Siberia.
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I reckon you could call them gutter journalists, LOL!
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