As an aid worker, I have two overwhelming priorities in life: 1) reduce human suffering and 2) stop pooping.
I’ve seen some success on point one. Point two might need to wait until after retirement, when I have a stable social group that can replace my bacterial colony. I wouldn’t want to be lonely. We’ve gone through so much together, my amoebas and I.
In my organisation, we don’t hire anyone who’s untested (read: has never lost 10% of their body weight in one week). Yes, you single-handedly fed 10,000 with 500 fish, but did you have giardia while you did it? Dengue? Typhoid? At a push, non-symptomatic bilharzia? If not, then this interview is over. I can’t trust you not to abandon your idealism with your first sulphur burp.
This may seem unfair, but the truth is that many do-gooders can live through culture shock, drought, hurricanes and a world without mozzarella, but it takes a special breed to be filled, continuously, by intestinal cataclysms and still crawl out the door and go to work.
It takes a humanitarian.
Humanitarians are not regular people. Since I began this work, my daily movements have been so irregular that I think of them as improvisations. They follow no discernible sequence. I do not digest. I do not detoxify. My DNA has stopped replicating itself and now produces only new enteroviruses.
Metaphorically, my bowels are a catastrophe UNOCHA has abandoned; they are an extemporaneous symphony, heavy on the oboes.
I often feel as if a gargoyle with long talons is fighting to get out of my diaphragm by way of my tailbone. On a good afternoon, I only look five months pregnant and I’m not taking medication. What’s the point? The critters I kill today will only be replaced by new critters tomorrow.
Having given up on treatment, my main policy is deterrence. I keep a spray bottle of vodka with me at all times and use it to disinfect cups, plates, door handles, and dates. I carry my own spoon, chopsticks, and stainless steel drinking straw. I pre-test salads on my cat. I chew gum that’s been soaked in antibacterial gel. I maintain a garlic clove suppository.
I try to make my body inhospitable so that the less motivated worms will crawl out of it. I do squats in the midday sun until I dehydrate and pass out. I exfoliate with diesel. I drink grain alcohol infused with cayenne pepper. I perform anti-parasite Reiki. I listen to death metal and Neil Diamond. To stimulate my gag reflex, I visualise my boss in a state of unparalleled bliss.
I’ve done the probiotic thing but I don’t recommend it. The good bacteria find common cause with the bad bacteria and, catastrophically – like in Braveheart – join forces against me.
It’s hard to remember what life was like before all this. Did I ever actually eat food I had dropped on the floor? Buy ice cream from a street vendor? Eat salad that didn’t taste like bleach?
It seems impossible that there was ever a time when I worried about getting enough fibre. These days, I could subsist on gravel and toothpaste and still not become costive.
Sometimes I think I should be in quarantine. Then I read about the dangers of an overly-sterile environment and think I could reduce human suffering (priority one) by helping other people poop like me. Maybe, if I can just hang on to my worms (abandonment of priority two), my irregular microbiome could save the human species.
It’s a noble thought. I think I shall add it to my CV, right after the ‘performs well with dysentery’ bullet point.
Dara Passano is a pseudonym.
Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow@GuardianGDP on Twitter.
