The Tundra Drums is reporting that some federal stimulus money will be making its way to rural Alaskan villages to help replace honey buckets with flush toilets. In this day and age, no one should be using a honey bucket. When I lived in the village, I had a honey bucket for the first 4 1/2 years. Finally, in the last year of my time there, a flush toilet was installed in my house. We had a huge water tank in the bathroom that also ran to the kitchen so that we could have running water to wash our hands and cook with. It emptied into a bucket under the sink which we had to haul outside to dump, but hey, we weren’t complaining.
Using the honey bucket was gross enough, but having to empty it was worse. No one wanted to be the one to empty it, and once it got too full, well, you had a problem. Hauling a practically overflowing bucket of human waste on a sled in the middle of a blizzard down to the local “lagoon” was probably the worst part of living in the village. I cringe just thinking about it.
So, if nothing else good comes out of the stimulus package (and I know it will), at least there will be fewer people that have to make that weekly trip to the lagoon. Thank you, President Obama.
Wow. What does it mean that it takes federal stimulus money to bring flushing toilets to a village housed in the state where the soon-to-be former governor claimed to be a woman of the people; proud Alaskan through and through. Guess she was blinded by the gleen from her shining thrown of fool’s gold. Pathetic.
I say the entire village should box up their honey buckets and send it on to good ol Sarah. A momento. Something to remember them by.
Right now I have a composting toilet. My septic system pipe got tree roots tangled in it. I could pay $500 to have it dug up and cut the tree down and go bankrupt or do it the old fashioned way which I had to choose. To give myself time to do the hand digging I made a chair with a hole in it and a cover, put a bucket under it and got some sawdust. It does not smell at all and I can compost it and use it in three years on the garden. This gives me time to dig up my own septic and get the tree roots out. I refust to cut the tree down as it gives beautiful shade around my back porch. A lot of my friends live off the grid and have one kind or another composting toilet. There are some really neat ones that burn the waste and it comes out in a tiny piece. Thank goodness I live five miles from town and noone can tell me what to do with my septic tank. Anyway, good luck and happiness for the new toilets in AK.