Sanctuary Farm and Sanivation

"The Treehouse".  That's a fake bronze hippo out front

      Sanctuary Farm is a large wildlife preserve right on the shore of Lake Naivasha.  Joan and Emily and I had a lunch reservation there.  To get there, Joan and I got a couple of motorcycle taxis.  These are another well-used transportation option for the locals.  The cost was the equivalent of about one U.S. buck apiece.  The ride was fun - if you could ignore the choking dust.

     In its earlier days, Sanctuary Farm was a polo club.  There was an old clubhouse building called The Treehouse that has been converted to a restaurant. It has a huge acacia tree growing right up thru the middle!  The upper deck features a balcony with a panoramic view of the plain, all the way to the lake.  There were no fences here between the lake and the Treehouse, so you had to be eternally vigilant of the animals, which included hippos and other nasty beasts.  We sat there on the balcony deck, and looked out and watched all the wildlife as we ate a wonderful lunch.  It was sort of like watching a nature show on TV while eating supper, but better!

View from upper deck, with lake in the distance, and fake hippo.

      Now let's switch from talking about food to talking about poop.  Located also at Sanctuary Farm is Emily's business:  Sanivation.   (www.sanivation.com)    The main office was an old house, converted into an office, complete with full kitchen, and a cook.  Like all the other buildings in the area, it was open and airy, with a huge veranda out front, all shaded by large trees, and surrounded by lovely gardens.  Air conditioning?  Never heard of it.  And of course, there are wild animals all around.  Sanivation employees told us that a day without animals around is a wasted day.

 

Entering the poop zone

    Sanivation's processing plant was about a half-mile away, and Joan and I finally got the full tour.  Sanivation builds and maintains portable toilets which anyone can subscribe for a few bucks a month.  For that price, they get a toilet, which looks like a round box painted bright blue.  It's small enough to be tucked under a bed or in a closet.  It has separate compartments for the urine and the solid matter.  It also comes with a bucket of charcoal dust; the instructions are to sprinkle the charcoal on your excrement, so to hold down the odor and begin the drying process.  Sanivation comes around with a 3-wheeled utility vehicle about once a week and trades out your full toilet for an empty one.

      Back at the processing plant, the excrement is heat-sanitized, dehydrated, mixed with waste plant matter, and compressed into charcoal briquets.  Human poop is actually an excellent substance for making charcoal because it is very fibrous, which makes the briquets more solid and cohesive than wood-based ones.  And they burn for a very long time.

     And so, Sanivation tackles at least two environmental and health issues simultaneously:  what to do with human waste, and an alternative to chopping down live trees for fuel.