Name: Oluwajuwon Filani

Social Justice Group: Water Pollution and Climate Change

Date of Fieldwork: March 31, 2022

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Jennifer Scales

Type of Fieldwork: Interview

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?[:: :

On Thursday, the 31th of March my group was honored to meet Jennifer Scales. Jennifer Scales is a professional at Discovery Center Gates Foundation. We were also with Rebecca Lawler who is Jennifer’s assistant.

Jennifer opens up the interview with a poop slide presentation and talked about poop, toilets and sanitation. What I learned from meeting her was that 3.5 billion people in the world are not connected to good waste management system. That’s almost half of the whole worlds entire population. Some people even have to pubicaly defecate, which is just pooping in public. Improper sanitation is the cause of 700,000 childhood deaths each year. Knowing this makes me really sad that this is happening to people around the world but it also encourages me to do more to sustain pure water and sanitation.

She also talked to us about different types of toilets. There are western toilet, urinals, and squat toilets. Squat toilets are more common than western toilets. Which is really surprising to me because I only us western toilets. There are solutions to this toilet problem though that she talked about. One in particular she talked about was a toilet that turns poop into ashes and filter our pee to be like ocean water. All in all it was really great talking to Jennifer and she taught us so much that I have never thought about before.