(above is a diagram of a return activated sludge plant. You may refer to this complex drawing periodically for this very science filled article)

When most people flush the toilet, not a single thought or feeling is given to the fate of their turds, to the outcome of their urine. It’s out of body, out of mind. Your favorite value meal or high dollar steak inevitably leaves your body with an unceremonious push of the anus. Water spirals around a bowl, accompanied by the cascading sound of a distant waterfall. You might then glance in the mirror, wipe the sweat off your brow, and exit, already thinking about your next meal.

What you don’t know is that your poo is now traveling at a scouring velocity down a pretty substantial pipe at the rate of about two feet per second. It might go through a series of pumps, through dozens of lift stations and holding basins, and finally arrive at the Inlet of a sewage treatment plant. This is where my unique set of skills comes into play. This is where all turds go to die or live on in eternity, depending on how you view the excremental, existential universe.

(The Inlet is that concrete building in the distance)

THE INLET: The Inlet is a lot like Hell of the Upside Down Sinners from Big Trouble in Little China. A desolate, cursed pit of wretched stank, and anytime your feet start walking up those grated steps, you’re reminded your life didn’t work out exactly as you had hoped. It’s the place where the death of your dreams isn’t only realized, it’s physically felt from your olfactory glands down to the pit of your stomach. The Inlet is equipped with grit chambers and blowers, but its main function is the bar screen, which must be cleaned manually every day. I once had to dry off my naked grandfather after he exited the shower because he was too old and sick to dry himself. That was less traumatic that cleaning the bar screen. Think of everything people flush down the toilet that can’t be liquefied. That’s what the bar screen catches and filters out. It’s packed tightly, in a wet mass of condoms, Kotex, and corn. Sometimes there is even a dollar bill or two, mostly around Mardi Gras, when drunk fools drop money in the toilet and decide it’s not worth picking out. Many of the plant employees who’ve buried their dreams long ago, decide it is worth picking out; they rifle through the bar screen with small tools, searching for that big payday. If money is found, it’s washed and placed in the sun to dry for the day before inevitably finding its way back into general circulation. The filth of lucre and the free market couldn’t be more clearly manifested. Anyway, the contents of the bar screen are pushed with a giant squeegee into a dumpster, which is picked up once a week and scattered in a landfill. This is the function of the Inlet.

(the bar screen and its contents pictured above)

Fun Fact: Why even eat Corn? It comes out just the same. We might as well eat pennies or little watch batteries. It would serve the same function.

(The E.Q. and you can almost smell it through the picture. Fart Soup.)

The EQ: Otherwise known as the Equalization Basin, is where pure, raw sewage gathers, festers, and mixes after going through the Inlet. Four giant aerators assist in keeping the smell down and oxygen levels just high enough to keep the entire basin from turning septic. A picturesque pond, where turds and every idea you have of them go to die. This is their great beyond, their nirvana. The cozy, familiar confines of intestinal linings become faint memories of home, as they are thrust into that great void, churning in great chaos and fury towards formlessness. Their old fibrous natures are stripped of all humanity; their log-like forms are deconstructed into the most basic elemental visages. Their terrestrial identities transcend into some sort of infinite, vast diarrhea with Bodhisattva wisdom. The EQ water represents everything the human spirit yearns for and strives to be. Outside, in the human world, my city is filled with class tension, racial hatred, and a general mix of misplaced anger and inner pain. We are all separate people, living selfish, individualistic lives, divided masses fighting for ill-conceived notions of happiness. The EQ represents the hope of humanity, us at our absolute bests. Here, our turds have become one. On a unified, peaceful accord. Insulated selfhood gives way into innate, homogenized harmony. If there was a stubborn turd who refused to evolve, he was left at the barscreen, like the chaff which the wind driveth away, cursed to dry out and die with a condom ring around his neck. Meanwhile, EQ water, traveling with newfound dignity, is pumped into something called Primary Settling Tanks. The journey continues. The beauty of divine formlessness is that movement and constant speed render time mute. As long as there is a voyage, there will never be a death. Matter’s constant flux and inability to be created or destroyed reminds one that our shit, which we hold most vile and offensive, contains the blueprint for eternity. Instead, we cling to materialism and distractions. Pity.

(The Primaries. I heard you can get AIDS if you sniff this tank too much)

The Primary Settling Tanks: The Primaries lack the chaotic hum and torrid splashing of the EQ. Peaceful, placid tanks where the solids are left to settle. Gravity, which governs the entire universe, does not take a break here. The heavier, solid particles, suspended in a murky unknown begin to fall slowly, like listless pollen tumbling through the air of a brisk, spring dawn. Through the gray, turbid waters, a dichotomy appears: solids, which we wastewater professionals call “sludge” and laymen worlds away refer to as “shit”, are collected in a giant hopper at the bottom of the tank and pumped into digesters. Meanwhile, the lighter, purer water falls unevenly into weirs and tumbles into a thrashing, churning sump.

The Sump: The Sump becomes a crossroads of sorts (kind of like that Bone Thugs In Harmony jam) where this new shit-laced water meets older, shit-laced water that we call “return activated.” This causes an explosion in fecal fecundity: the mixture of these bodies results in the new waters being activated, doused with ciliates, baptized with tiny organisms which will remove the Ites from the land. Here, it’s the ciliates, which are a friendly protozoa, that indicate healthy sludge and a stable wastewater system. They feed on the bacteria and help clarify and purify. These new waters are then pumped by sump pumps into the Aeration Basin. You could even make a song about this because sump, pump, dump, and hump all rhyme, but I won’t because this is a serious article. All you need know is that such a song exists, as well as a dance that accompanies it which pelvic thrusts and various outdoor turd-squatting poses are involved.

(THE A.B.)

The Aeration Basin: We call it the A.B. and it’s cray-z. It tickles the senses, grabs one and doesn’t let go. If gazed at long enough, the inner beast is awakened inside you, and that’s when you realize as you stare into those churning chocolate waters, that the beast is staring right back. Six mega-giant aerators tear into these primal waters, indiscriminately destroying any type of serenity it ever dreamed of having. It’s baptism by fire, with each aerator operating at the rate of 6,000 submerged elephant farts per minute. The sludge filled waters here aren’t meant to settle. We do everything in our power to make sure this tank stays crazier than a rabid crackhead’s wild, desperate street antics. If things ever did settle down, and the water became as placid as a puddle of urine behind a Denny’s dumpster, bulking and flocculation would commence, nitrification would set in, killing our celestial ciliates, depleting dissolved oxygen levels, raising the PH, and sending the biochemical oxygen demand soaring. In short, it would be like the Challenger shuttle fiasco of 1986 all over again. This tank, and it’s trusty aerators, insures that our sludge soaked waters keep their suspended solids in a healthy medium before sending said waters into the Final Settling Tanks.

(The Final Settling Tanks, with Clarivac shooting poo)

The Final Settling Tanks: As the murky, mixed up chocolate waters make their way in, they are met by something called Clarivacs. As the water enters this calm basin, the particles start to drop out, creating a layer of thick sludge at the bottom of the tanks. That’s where there Clarivacs come in; they meander the bottom of the tank like granddaddy catfish ambling along the cloudy bed of the mighty Mississippi, sucking up all organic particles in the way. This sludge is siphoned through four giant tubes, each one like a shit-shooting cannon. Hundreds of gallons of thick shit are shot every minute into a trench that funnels this sludge back into the sump. This prodigal poo now is return activated, charged to infiltrate and mix with the incoming cascade trickling in from the Primary Settling Tanks. Meanwhile, at the back of the Final Settling Tanks, crystal clear water, where almost all the sediment and solids have dropped out, falls into weirs and is shuffled off into the Chlorine Contact Chambers.

(Contact Chamber)

Chlorine Contact Chambers: A deep, cement labyrinth guides these pristine waters around sharp corners and difficult angles. So far, any fecal content, bacteria, or microorganisms which have made it to this point are undoubtedly the best of the best. John Rambo type feces. Nothing short of chemical warfare will destroy them. Enough chlorine to kill an assisted living community is pumped in. You can smell the chlorine in the air, reminds me of a fresh, fluffy load of white laundry. Now, I know you may be thinking that we just can’t discharge millions of gallons of chlorinated water into nature. There are rules about things like that, rules we try and follow. At the end of the chamber, after the water has fallen over yet another weir, it’s met with sulphur dioxide. If Chlorine are the Crips, then Sulphur Dioxide are the bloods. They fight an underwater battle to the death, neutralizing each other, making our water free from chemicals, bacteria, and solids. This purified, divine H2O makes its way down a giant pipe and is pumped into a drainage canal that leads to a huge freshwater lake. The dissolved oxygen level of our finished product is about 6 milligrams per liter or parts per million, whichever you prefer. Fish come from miles around simply to breath and play in this water. It’s a bastion for aquatic life everywhere. Sometimes, I’ll throw my cast net into our effluent (where our pipe meets the canal) and come up with 30 to 40 fish. At least one 5 lb Bass is expected. I don’t eat any of them though because it feels like cheating. I’m a sportsman, not a fish massacre-er. I just look at them, maybe poke one in the stomach and make a joke about how they don’t have any arms or legs, and then throw them back.

(Picture of my typical catch)

At this point, you maybe wondering what happens to all the solids. Well, the heaviest solids which fell out in the primary settling tanks are pumped into Digesters, and we also periodically pump solids from the sump into said Digesters, to keep our sludge fresh, lively, and exciting. You don’t want your sludge to get too old, as nematodes and rotifers take over and eat the ciliates. In this microorganism warfare, we the gods, tip the scales in the favor of our own laid plans. I’m sure the rotifers have no idea why they can’t win, can’t gain foothold in our tanks. In the same ways we futility pray to the heavens for a new car or a superbowl victory. We don’t understand that bigger things are afoot, a grander scheme plays out, a scheme that rarely overlaps with our deepest or most frivolous desires. All which is meant to be will be.

(Digesters)

The Digesters: Imagine a fifty foot cylinder, chocked full of shit, and try not to smile. Every time I’m at work and glace at those towers of terror, I chuckle. Inside them, anaerobic bacteria eat away at the poo, changing its molecular structure. Explosive methane gas is the byproduct. We’re supposed to burn off or release these trapped gasses, but we never do. The whole things could explode any minute, sending shit flying miles away, raining on unsuspecting citizens, caught in a fecal storm of epic proportions. An elderly widow toils away in her garden at dusk. The shadows of her dandelions undulate with a light breeze. Suddenly, a mass of burning human excrement falls from the heavens upon her like molten lava spewed by a volcanic blast that would make Krakatoa seem like a science fair project. It would be hellish; not even John the Revelator could predict such diabolic catastrophe. One time, a safety man came to the planet to inspect our digesters for danger. When he put his little machine next to them, the needle pegged out as super dangerous, and he couldn’t even reset it. The gasses literally broke his machine. If I die in an explosion, I’m sure my family will get super rich due to this negligence. That is my only condolence, that and knowing it will be a quick death, unlike the hoards of cursed fools destined to suffer the slow demise of a fiery fecal napalm. In any case, the digesters can’t hold all the shit in the world forever and must be emptied. The poo is sent to something called the Filter Press.

Filter Press: The Press is a fat, loud shit-eating machine. It’s like most Americans, but it has more of a personality. It sits there all day, squeezing the juices out of the sludge, producing dried cakes of flat, black cork-like material. There is no semblance of human excrement left. Everything it once was seems like a faint memory or a half forgotten dream. It doesn’t look, smell, or feel like anything that could ever come out of your butt, a reminder we live in a world where change is abundant and necessary. These flat, black pancakes can either be buried, burned, or sold as fertilizer. We generally just send it to the landfill, as that’s the easiest way to get rid of it. I mean, we could just flush it down the toilet, but where would that get us?

And that’s the process. That’s how it all works. You now have a shit education (something the public school system gave me years ago). It’s admirable the way we humans have colonized and controlled this planet, but the way we treat it is a disgrace. Our trash, the things we leave in our wake, things like rusted metals, cheap plastics, and harmful emissions curse the air, land, and sea; however, the refuse we find most contemptible, the refuse we can’t stand to look at, touch, or smell can be recycled back into the environment not only seamlessly, but in a way that actually benefits the natural world. And it’s sad because we know more about the Olson twins’ filmography than we do about the fate of our own flushed feces. Well, news flash: The Olson twins shit too. Hell, they probably sit in a special bathroom with adjoining toilets, holding hands while grimacing and shitting tiny, identical little turds in unison. Wake up America! Turds and water are like caterpillars and butterflies. That’s an S.A.T. question.

Now that I’ve pretty much overwhelmed you with science, let’s get to the fun parts. I will now rank the three least desired places at the poo plant to fall in.

3.) The AB: If you’re in, it’s certain death. Even someone with superior swimming abilities, like a burly Hasslehoff wearing floaties, couldn’t survive. The buoyancy you know and love that follows you to the beach or swimming pool won’t be by your side. Here, the aerators are so effective and chaotic, the bubbles change the water’s density. You would sink faster than Stephen Hawking wearing a brass toilet seat around his neck. As you slowly fall to the bottom of this 30 foot tank, you’d be swallowing shit all the way down. Your feet would finally touch the soft floor. You’d struggle. You could even walk around a bit even, like a curious astronaut on the moon, but you could never come back to the surface. The sky would seem like an opaque window to another world beyond your grasp. You’d then die.

2.) The EQ: Only one man has lost his balance and tumbled in, claimed he swallowed some corn and spit out a condom. He said he wasn’t worried about hepatitis because he already had it. He fell very ill afterwards, but claims he has never got sick since then. Whatever was in that water prepared his immune system for a lifetime of germs. Many claim that if they ever fall in, they won’t fight it, but succumb to death’s rank embrace. It would be better to die than live with the memory that you were once submerged in a filthy fecal-filled fountain. And the stench is indescribable. There is a saying, “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” but by the smell of our incoming wastewater, I think that’s exactly what people do around here. I can best describe the putrid smell like this: picture a three day old bloated corpse with a yeast infection who was left in the sun. Now jump up and down on top of its stomach. That’s it. Would you even try and swim out? Could you find the strength to go on living after that?

1.) A Digester: Aged feces, with the consistency of quicksand pulls you down into a murky abyss. If the methane and hydrogen sulphide don’t kill you, you’ll gobble down gallons of shit as you plead for help while sinking into a deep pit of excrement that has been aged like fine wine. There is no way out. You’re body will be fished from the digester hours later by reluctant emergency personnel, and they will treat your mortal coils irrelevantly, like roadkill. Bystanders will make jokes even before rigor mortis sets in. People will do David Caruso impressions, removing their sunglasses while waxing pithy shit related puns. You’ll undoubtedly have to be incinerated. Even your ashes will smell like dookie. Your relatives will make up some distracting lie about your death. A car crash. A chainsaw accident. Anything but the truth. Jesus won’t even be able to stomach your spirit’s stench in the afterlife. You’ll be quarantined in heaven like a leaper. Correction: even Jesus could cure leapers.

Myth and Folklore:

Genetically Altered Gator: Many talk of a giant alligator that lives in the EQ. A thirty foot turd gargling beast who laps up incoming sewage, and these toxic waters have turned him into some kind of super-intelligent killing machine who has mastered stealth and can mimic human behavior. He’s kind of like a big, mean ninja turtle. I don’t believe any of this foolishness, except at night. When I walk the banks, my heart always beats a little faster

The AB monster: The AB is filled with little brown spiders on the catwalks and hand railings. It’s said that in this deep, dark tank, a giant momma spider dwells in a melancholy, subdued state. She’s ten foot high and ten foot across and can breath underwater. And if you kill her baby spiders, she’ll drag you down and eat on your corpse for weeks. They say that at night she awakes and leaves the tank and hunts in the woods nearby, eating pigs, gators, cows, and deer. I don’t believe this crap, but I don’t kill any baby spiders just incase.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night when my girlfriend is sleeping real hard, in the R.E.M sleep they talk about on mattress commercials, I’ll pin her down and place my put mouth an inch from her ear and whisper about monster tales in a really squeaky voice. I tell her that I throw a little of my poo straight into the EQ ,so the EQ Gator will know my scent and accept my sacrifices and never harm me. Sometimes I’ll tell her about the AB monster eating a whole heard of cattle, guts and all. She wakes up slowly and terrified, not knowing where she’s at or what’s going on or if it’s a dream. Often, she’ll start screaming and since I’ve already got her pinned down I just hold her there laughing my ass off. That’s when she really freaks out. It takes her a few solid minutes to piece together what’s going on, and usually after she’s finished crying we’ll both have a pretty good laugh about it.

And just to clear something up, my job isn’t nearly as gross as one might think. When people picture a poo plant, they think of errant, misplaced turds just lying around in the sun. They think of a shit-stained door handle to the main office, a slack-jawed worker with a skid mark across his forehead fumbling with some giant pipe wrench. Not the case. The smell is only bad around the EQ and Inlet, which are located pretty far away, and the only time I’m up close and personal with sewage (besides cleaning the barscreen) is when I take the daily settling test. I scoop up a bunch of sludge water from the AB, place it in am Imhoff cone, and watch it settle. I have to document the rate it settles. MLSS (mixed liquor suspended solids) and TSS (total suspended solids) are things we have to know. Also, we have to document it’s texture (usually fluffy) smell (usually OK) and if there are worms (not usually).

(settling test: you can see the cone full of fallen shit. My first day they told me taste was also part of the test. Not funny.)

Another perk of working there is the natural beauty that is abundant throughout the area. There are lakes, ponds, bayous, and canals that surround the plant. Sometimes I’ll climb on top the digesters and cool out for a while. Or I’ll watch a peaceful sunrise or sunset to wind down the day. There are gators, turtles, deer, snakes, nutria rats, and all sorts of animals to study and throw rocks at. I typically enjoy this job. I don’t know how long I’ll have it, but at least I can say I fully understand Shit. And so can you.

Rural Kenya in winter is colder than one would expect, even when
you are from Wisconsin. There is no snowfall, but the high humidity and
the cool air after sunset seeps away any warmth that has not been
instilled by alcohol. There are no streetlights, so after 5pm, when the
sun slips behind the tea plantation-pocked hills, it is impenetrably
dark. The hospital where I am working is effectively isolated from the
rest of the world. The phone works rarely, and the internet connection
exists only in theory. Deep within the countryside, there are no stray
noises apart from the occasional cow wandering through hospital
grounds. The dim silence is unnerving enough to make me wonder why I
wanted to volunteer here.

The town of Maua is a crowded and dirty place in the Meru district,
about 130 miles from Nairobi. It is a wide spot in the road flanked by
a dense concentration of shacks containing businesses, barbers,
groceries, restaurants, and junk shops, with piles of burning
garbage scattered throughout. The most numerous of these are bottle
stores, known to westerners as pubs. Men fill the bottle stores, and
their bingeing spills out into the muddy streets. Drunken
arguments in Swahili sound pretty much the same as their English
equivalents, veering rapidly between love and belligerence. During the
day people sell random items from blankets by the road. Some are
useful, like cheap radios, clothing, and machetes; some useless, like
used batteries charged with a single volt for resale to the unaware.
The machetes are made from the leaf springs of larger cars, so they are heavy and easily able to divide skin and bone. For the hefty price
of US$2, you can have your very own, stamped with the words
“Specially Made for Children”. My hospital specializes in tendon repair
and internal fixation for near-amputations. We average six of these per
day in a town of perhaps ten thousand. Usually the victim, often a child, has been caught
trespassing in a miraa field.

Miraa is the primary industry. It’s an amphetamine in the form of
a
green stalk that has been denuded of its drug free leaves. A clump of
fifty can be
yours for 500 kenyan shillings, enough to do a week’s shopping for a
family of four. All the men in this town chew miraa, their eyes a blank
slate of suppressed anger. The women do not chew miraa, nor drink.
Women do the cleaning, the farming, and child rearing. The men tend the
cattle by tradition, although there have been no cattle in Maua for
decades. All day and night, giant trucks speed through the town,
hauling miraa and occasionally flattening a child or errant goat.

Maua is a small cauldron of discontent and dreams unrealized, much
like small towns in the United States. HIV made its slow burn through
here long ago, leaving an infection rate of about one in ten. Commerce
is slow, progress nonexistent in a place where inertia has trumped the
flow of history. The people of this area do not appear to mind the
gradual decline of rural Kenya over the past two decades. Optimism and
skepticism are irrelevant when it is one’s appointed task to simply
endure. At least, this is the way it seems to a tourist like me.

I am working at a mission hospital, which is better in quality than
the government funded Meru District Hospital. We have some laboratory
test and X-ray capability, which is uncommon in this area. The
hospital’s resources are stretched thin, wards perpetually stuffed,
every bed filled with two people and mats on the floor for the more
stable patients. At night, the ill and destitute
sleep in almost complete silence, stirring to swat the occasional
mosquito. The overworked physicians are getting some much needed sleep,
as medical students like me are around to staff the casualty during the
night. I am here to learn medicine as my trade, with idealism as my
ballast.

Some nights I am bored to the tits, reading Swahili vocabulary and
trying to sleep. This night, however, starts off with a mother bringing
in her child, perhaps two years old, and obviously dead. The body is
stiff, eyes staring sightlessly, pupils dilated to the diameter of the
iris. No heartbeat, no spontaneous respirations. Its belly is swollen
with kwashiorkor, a protein deficiency of malnutrition. There is money
in this town, but it does not go to food.

I inform the mother through a translator that the child is quite
dead. They take her to another room to grieve, and summon the priest on
call. The priests generally don’t sleep very well. An urgent phone call
comes in – a child is dying in the pediatric ward. I sprint over to the
ward to see if my inexperienced presence will be helpful. This child
has severe malaria and, as a result, only one fifth of his blood supply.
Malaria can be an aggressive disease in those least able to fight back,
and this child just made it to the hospital too late for the treatment
to help. His agonized breathing stops and his heartbeat soon follows.
The children in the other beds look in my general direction, faces a
mixture of fear and curiosity. I avoid their searching glances, as I
know some of them will die before sunrise.

Several patients are waiting for me in casualty. The first two have
minor complaints, and are quickly sent on their way. The third is a
woman sitting quietly, and not complaining of anything beyond abdominal
pain. A pregnancy test is sent. I return to her room to inform her
she is pregnant and find her nearly unconscious on the floor,
whimpering. A needle plunged into her abdomen yields blood suggesting a
large hemorrhage from a misplaced pregnancy that has ruptured her
reproductive organs. The OB-Gyn surgeon is summoned, and the patient is wheeled
to surgery with a bag of malaria-infested blood for transfusion. It is
disconcerting when someone looks perfectly fine one moment
and the next are on the edge of the mortal plane. For some reason,
African patients have this in common, showing few signs of illness
until on the verge of death. There is no explanation for this, other
than perhaps a lifetime of pain and abuse tempering individuals to
withstand almost anything. Materials so tempered become hard, but brittle.

It is only 1am and I am beyond tired. The previous morning was
spent scrubbed in for several hours of surgery to debride a leg wound a
farmer gave to himself with the dirty end of a farm implement. He had
walked to the hospital from several miles away with a large abscess
that proceeded to blow open during his hike. People here will walk for
miles to reach a hospital. A week prior I helped fix a leg fracture
that a woman walked upon for at least two miles, dragging herself
the last several hundred feet.

Next up is a perhaps three year old child who has malnutrition and
looks dead. He isn’t moving. Upon a closer look, he is just
avoiding movement or making sounds, his eyes wide with fear, mouth
agape. Trying to move his neck elicits a weak cry. Meningitis looks
like this, and kills in a matter of hours. After I put in an IV and
start the antibiotics, it is off to the pediatric ward with him. His
chances of survival are about half, with a good chance of residual
brain damage. The next five hours are utter torture, with dead
children, surgical emergencies, and women in labor. The patients
waiting to be seen in casualty pile up endlessly.

The last child brought in sometime before sunrise had some sort of
pneumonia, but my thoughts end there when she stops breathing in front
of me. Standard therapy is to intubate the child and ventilate her
after a few attempts at rescue breaths. The rescue breaths are
unsuccessful, and so I reach for the intubation equipment. The power fails, leaving me to flail about in the
dark. Power outages and surges are common here, but the timing of this one could
not be worse. I retrieve the tube and a headlamp and turn to find the
child vomiting – her airway would now be compromised.

I call for “Suction!” in a dramatic manner. The nurse retrieves a
medieval looking machine out of a cabinet that provides suction via
foot pump, and promptly leaves me alone with the child. The process of
intubation is fairly difficult, particularly for a medical student with
little experience. It’s made much more difficult by trying to operate
a foot pump, suctioning vomit out of a child’s throat by the dim light
of a headlamp and looking for the vocal cord target whilst a mother is
looking on expectantly. After what seems an entire football half, and
four failed attempts, the child is intubated, and ventilated. She
is also dead at this point. There are times you can look a family
member in the eye and inform them that their child is dead, but this is
not one of them. I give the bad news to the floor while the nurse
(now back in the room) translates. I return to the casualty room with
what is left of my confidence to find yet another apparently dead body
waiting for
me.

A family of five struggles to hoist this forty year old man onto
the examination bed, and he is unresponsive. At first, I am resigned to
going through the motions to confirm death, but he has a faint heart
beat, and shallow breathing. They could tell me little about him except
he is taking a medication of some sort. He is quite fat, which is
unusual for this area. I inject him with sugar on a whim, and within
two seconds, he is off the bed and thrashing violently. After the next
shot he is merely confused. The unknown medication he was taking must
have been for diabetes, and his prescribing doctor must have overdone the dose. I
take some comfort in knowing that Lazarus would recover after a few
days. A success story ends my evening. Now, it is time to begin the work
day proper.

The morning sun does little to invigorate me as I trudge to the
pediatric ward to begin my rounds. My mind swims with the faces of
those left behind in the night. Real or imagined accusations seem to be
in every pair of eyes I meet in the hallway. I would later learn to
avoid reflecting immediately on disastrous shifts like this. As it
turns out, regret has a very long half life, and is more than willing
to wait until you have had a decent amount of sleep.

The hospital begins its daily hum, the theatre is beginning its
daily surgical schedule, and the casualty fills with its usual endless
line of illness. Outside the hospital grounds, Maua begins its day just
as it always has. The petrol station already has miraa trucks queuing
up for the road ahead. The bottle stores and businesses open their
doors, and blankets are spread by the roadside to hawk miscellaneous
wares. The town is saddled with more than its share of misery, yet
balanced by an inexplicable fortitude that seems to be uniquely
African. Unique, at least, to someone who has a great deal to learn
about the vast regions of the world in which survival is a daily
struggle.

Looking back with the benefit of a few years experience, I am not
convinced that my work in Kenya made the slightest difference. In an
area of intensive poverty, not much can. Perhaps a rare correct
diagnosis, maybe even a few saved lives, possibilities that grant me a
great deal of undeserved credit. Local life expectancy is 49, and
likely any victory I can claim has since been swallowed whole by the HIV
epidemic, starvation, and environmental disasters. The idea of
improving community health is a feeble one compared to unfair,
international trade agreements and the corrupt rulers who pocket
international aid. My good deeds give these systems that much
more latitude.

From the outside, Africa does not stand a chance. The only
continent to fail to progress in the last century, its people seem
destined to a long slog through history. Western Africa has been
wracked by unrest fomented by outsiders. Central Africa is home to the
world’s longest running and bloodiest war. Southern Africa remains the
epicenter of the greatest plague ever. Even wealthy South Africa, with
the world’s most liberal constitution, is overrun with bizarre and
violent crime, and rape is the unofficial national pastime. Yet, there was a
time I believed in saving Africa.

Having shed the catharsis of volunteer work, I later return to
Africa with an entirely different perspective. Africa requires no
sympathy, and certainly no white knight savior. The continent as a
whole would enter a new economic renaissance if it were left
alone, without foreign interference. The way I see it, I am simply
trying to return the area where I work back to a normal state of
affairs.

Credit for any victory here is due only to those surviving on the
edge of existence, powered by faith. I use this word with no
religious overtones, as it means simply belief without evidence. There
is no other word for how a child can watch its parents die of AIDS, and
yet retain the ability to smile, looking forward to sunnier days.

There’s no way that accepting a job on the Ham Line at Tyson’s Meats reports a life of success. Generally, two kinds of people land these jobs – those entering the country and those exiting prison. In my case, a court ordered mandate and mess of legal problems rendering me unemployable resulted in an eight month stint at the place. I could take the job at Arbys my well meaning grandma set up for me, a 31 year old man, or I could not commit suicide and instead go to work at the hardcorest meat packing plant in the Midwest.

The Tyson’s plant in my town concentrates on hog packaging. A couple hours away I know there’s one that deals in chickens. Across the Illinois border, they pack cows. We worked with hogs. At any hour of the day convoys of trucks lined up waiting to dump their load at the factory. They‘d come from big Iowa factory farms and small family farms that sold their swine at markets. I just know there were thousands of hogs outside of that place all the time and you could smell the stench and hear the squealing and snorting downwind. There must be billions of hogs in this state.

The trucks would pull up to the large open doors at the back of the factory. During our orientation tour, we got a glimpse of what went down back there, but it was later described to me in greater detail by a Kill Floor worker. When they opened the trailer gates hogs would charge out, jostling one another for position. I don’t know why people think pigs are smart. They’re stupid. They’d break each others legs, bite each other on the ears and snout, and check one another into the wall. Like I said, I got a minor peek at this process and it’s one of those broken memories of a chaotic event- all I can recall is a bunch of hogs running in a circle, a Mexican yelling, someone’s hardhat sailing through the air, and our tour guide quickly telling us to keep moving.

What awaits each hog is a zap to the neck or right behind the ears with an actual lightsaber, the electric tong, that serves to render the beast unconscious so it supposedly doesn’t feel the soon-to-come execution. PETA doesn’t like these things, as the animal allegedly wakes up sometimes.

But what’s even more compelling is something else that Kill Floor worker told me. Occasionally, a rebellious hog would resist by lumbering up against the back of the truck or in the corner of the pen wall. This guy told me there were times he’d have to go and physically wrestle the hog in order to get him to cooperate. He’d wrestle these hogs, not for sport, not for wagering, but for ten dollars an hour. Do you know how strong a pissed off hog must be? I figure there had to be times where they‘d just ride them, to get them motivated and steered in the right direction.

After all this, the buzzed hogs fall onto a conveyor belt and ascend to a platform where some doubtlessly messed-up guys slit their throats and puncture strategic parts of their swine bodies to drain the blood into a large vat below. Down the line, more guys position the hogs appropriately for leg clamps that dangle from a reverse conveyor belt strung throughout the entire factory ceiling. And this is where the hog’s journey really begins.

Their first stop is what is called the Wall of Fire, where the hogs pass through a superheated enclosed panel with actual flames that burns the hair from their bodies. They come out of that, are sprayed, and then brushed off like in a car wash. Then, because they’re still full of all sorts of organs, they go to the Gut Removal Machine which lives up to it’s billing. It’s like the worst theme park ever. After the hogs’ intestines have been removed they move through a cavalcade of stations, the disassembly line, where various instruments are stuck into the carcasses and various things are pulled out. Buckets of giblets, snouts, ears, tails, teeth, tongues, and balls are aligned along the track. The hogs are dangling, hung by their feet, and there are thousands of them, traveling along this upside down conveyor belt to be felt up and humiliated by various people on the factory floor. There are jobs I don’t even understand. There’s one guy that works with their hooves. There’s another one that rubs some powder on their chests. There is one guy that takes a little hook, stretches their anus, and peeks inside. Some of you may find this whole process sensual. I didn’t really think it was.

On the days I worked the “hot side” of the factory, this is the point where I would get my crack at the oinking motherfuckers. I worked eight hours manning a 400 lb suspended cut saw that served to split the bodies in half. I made a vertical slice from their privates down to their chinny chins. Most of the blood had been drained by then but I got a nice facial every so often. Really though, I more or less guided the machine through the carcass, as you’d otherwise get tired pretty quickly muscling a quarter ton saw through a pig’s torso 5,000 times a day.

Finally, Porky is parked in a refrigerator for a couple days to harden before his trip to the cold side of the factory where he then is literally ripped apart into high end and low end product. His organs and soul discarded on the hot side, the pig is now ready to become your glazed Christmas ham.

I usually worked on the cold side, part of the infamous Ham Line. It was me, fourteen Mexicans, sixteen Bosnians, and a recovering drug addict who always had some crank. My job was to trim fat from the hambone with a Whizzard Knife, a whirling circular razor blade. About my 4th month in, I saw a guy cut three of his fingers off. Blood flowed everywhere. The line shut down for 30 minutes. Anyhow, my supervisor Miquel advised me on how to trim the fat with precision, making a V-line from the hip bone circling around to what I guess would’ve been the hog’s side. A Bosnian guy next to me that looked exactly like Napoleon in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure worked 16 hours a day, 6 days a week doing this! So anyway, you’d take your Whizzard knife, methodically whiz one side of the ham, turn it, flip it over, and whiz the other side. Steve, the tweaker, gave me better instructions,

“Just slice here, here, and here. We ain‘t fucking astronauts (Really, Steve?). You don’t got time to wine and dine these things, you just wanna keep the line moving. Fuck these hogs!”

One time, one of the hambones had a big creamy green spot on it. The Ham Line unloader told me to smell it. I did. It was an abscess. I whizzed it and gave it to Napoleon.