The Daily Ordeal of Girls in Cuban Schools

Eight hours without going to the bathroom

There is no water, the toilet bowls are full, it stinks and the doors are broken. Girls are the ones who have it the worst.

By Natalia Lopez Moya (14ymedio)

HAVANA TIMES – It is time to prepare school supplies, to wait in long lines to buy the uniforms that students will wear to school in September, but also to start looking for solutions to alleviate one of the most serious problems in Cuban schools: the lack of hygiene and safety in the bathrooms. Girls are the ones who have it the worst.

“I prepare two bottles of water for her, one to drink and one to wash her hands when she goes to the bathroom, but she never uses it,” Dagmara, the mother of a teenager who is in elementary school in Old Havana, told 14ymedio. The girl, who will be entering ninth grade in a few days, has just had a kidney infection that is apparently related to the time she spends without urinating while at school.

“When she was taking her eighth grade final exams, she started to have a high fever and chills,” she explains. “The doctor told us that she was going to need antibiotics and that she seemed to spend a lot of time without drinking water or urinating.” Diannis, her name has been changed for this story, stays in the classroom for more than eight hours a day without going near the toilets. “They have a lot of stench and the doors to the stalls are broken.”

Diannis describes the bathroom as a place that is best kept away from. “The sinks don’t have water, the toilets are almost always full because there is no way to flush them, sometimes people do their business outside the stalls because they don’t want to go in there, and to top it all off, the doors are broken or have been gone for a long time, so there is no privacy.”

“When I have my period I don’t go to school. I spend the whole week at home because I don’t have the conditions to change and clean myself there,” she admits. “I don’t go to school once a month and several of my friends do the same. The teachers know what it’s about and they don’t say anything to us because having your period at school is very hard. You can’t even wash your hands after changing your pad.”

The directors of the secondary school where Diannis studies know the problem. At every parent meeting, the teachers ask for help cleaning the bathrooms. “One or two of us step forward, we go, we do a deep cleaning and a month later everything is as always: dirty,” admits Dagmara. “Once my husband and I went and even fixed the door of a stall and put a lock and key on it so that the boys in our daughter’s classroom could use it. Shortly afterward we found out that that bathroom was now for ’municipal visits’ from Education and the students could no longer use it.”

The lack of cleaning staff, due to low wages and harsh working conditions, also contributes to the catastrophic situation in school toilets. On top of that, the toilets are not only dirty, but also lack toilet paper, water and soap, containers to dispose of sanitary pads, are poorly lit, poorly signposted and often unsafe.

“I have a younger daughter who is now in primary school and has already learned, from what her sister tells her, that she cannot go to the school bathroom,” laments Dagmara. “I cannot send her with a portable toilet but she cannot come to the house every time she needs to go to the bathroom either because there is a very busy street in between and it would be dangerous. We don’t know what we are going to do and nobody seems to care about this.”

However, the issue has had great relevance in campaigns by international organizations such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). “Hygiene is our right” promotes one of its initiatives that seeks to guarantee “menstrual hygiene, hand washing and health habits for girls, boys and adolescents at school, to encourage them to stay in class and promote their right to health.”

“We are measured by other parameters, such as class attendance, grades, the number of students who pass, but it is true that the issue of bathrooms is in no man’s land, it is not something that is monitored much,” admits a teacher from a primary school in the Havana neighborhood of El Cerro, near Calle Infanta. The premises where she teaches, a former teacher-training school, originally had large areas dedicated to toilets.

“There are many problems with blockages, so we have had to close some toilets. Right now the water is not arriving every day and when September starts and the students are already in the classrooms the situation will get worse,” warns the woman who has recently joined the brigades that try to get the schools ready for the imminent start of the school year. “They haven’t even given us detergent, we don’t even have brooms,” she laments.

For UNICEF, “access to water, sanitation and hygiene is essential to ensure the health of students,” but a good part of Cuban schools have problems with the supply due to issues ranging from the deterioration of the pipes to occasional breakages for which there are neither resources nor manpower to fix them. “The toilets are clogged, they don’t drain properly and the sinks are stolen” is how the teacher describes the situation at her school.

“I have children who can bring water from home to wash their hands, wet wipes and other resources to maintain their hygiene, but I have others who come to school to do their business because they don’t even have a latrine at home because they live in shelters or in lots with one communal toilet for many people. What can I say to these children when they ask me to let them go to the bathroom and I know the situation they are going to find?”

In El Cotorro, Yuri, 42, has gone several times to speak to the director of the secondary school where her son studies. “The bathroom is not safe, the windows face the street and they have already caught some men watching the children. My son began to reject school, he didn’t say anything to me but after asking him a lot he confessed to me that he is afraid to go to the bathroom, that adults who come from other places come or hang around there.”

“A year ago, two boys who were not from the school went into that bathroom and fought with knives, amid the children. Nobody went to separate them and the incident was not even reported to the police, but my son saw it and after that he doesn’t want to go near that place, which doesn’t even have doors,” she adds.

“Where there used to be toilets, there is now a hole in the floor where they have to urinate, but every time I raise the issue, they tell me that they are boys and that it doesn’t matter,” laments the father. “If one day they feel sick to their stomach, they can’t go to school that day or they have to go home and miss the rest of their classes.”

In the home of twins Paula and Natalia, the grandmother, who has played the role of mother and father since the parents of the teenagers left for Mexico via Managua to try to reach the United States, is clear in her warnings: “You don’t go to the bathroom at school. If you have an emergency, you tell the teacher to send you home.”

Before long, the girls’ emergencies are likely to multiply when they start their periods. By then, they’ll have to miss classes, they’ll stop listening to the math teacher explain fractions and the physics teacher detail the forces that act on certain objects. All that lost knowledge will be at the expense of the classroom bathrooms, those unsafe and dirty places.

Translated by Translating Cuba.

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