I love traveling. Except for the time that I have to go to the restroom in a hurry. Mostly, there were rarely public restrooms, or I had to pay for the restroom on the outside. And, I am proud of the developed restroom culture of Korea. This revolves on the ‘World Toilet Association’ in Suwon, Korea. The World Toilet Association does positive work to let the world know about the importance of good restrooms. They provide appropriate sanitary facilities and safe drinking water to developing countries for the development of human health.

▲ `Haewoojae`

▲ by Korea Bizwire

According to the World Toilet Association, twenty-six billion people which is forty percent of the world population are living without appropriate restrooms. Especially people in developing countries are suffering from poor sanitation. About ten billion people still practice open defecation. Millions of people have to move a long distance to use safe restrooms. Especially for girls and women, open defecation exposures them to physical assault and rape. Because they go to restrooms late at night or dawn to not show in open defecation. Like this, not only does open defecation destroy human dignity, it causes terrible problems. Two-thirds of the world population can’t use papers after going to the restrooms. Only sixty-four percent of people in the world are using restrooms. Through this, two hundred million people are dying from waterborne infections per year. Led by Korea, sixty-six countries designated November nineteenth as a ‘World Toilet day.’ Over the past several years, they concentrate on enhancing the awareness of global sanitary problems with ‘Urgent Run,’ which is an organization to prevent hygiene crises.

▲ Open defecation

▲ by Vanguard News

The World Toilet Association is getting support from ‘Toilet angels’ who want to help children suffering from unsanitary environments without restrooms. And in Suwon, there is a museum named ‘Haewoojae’ which means “a house to relieve one’s concerns.” It is shaped like a toilet. This built after Mr. Toilet, Sim Jae-deok’s house is demolished, who started the World Toilet Association. He built Haewoojae to celebrate the establishment of the World Toilet Association. Suwon-si is continually developing the Haewoojae. They made Haewoojae as a gallery of restroom culture and built a restroom culture park. In the restroom culture park, you can enjoy the changing history of East and West toilets. The World Toilet Association is making efforts as a spearhead of restroom culture like having factual surveys of sanitary facilities in the world, world toilet leader’s forum, and youth forum, and enacting standard techniques of world’s restrooms.

Poor sanitary facilities damage people’s health and contaminate drinking water, so the absence of appropriate sanitary facilities is a huge problem. We naturally go to restrooms several times a day. But billions of people in this world don't have even one restroom. We have to be aware of the problems of poor sanitary facilities and continually seek solutions for better restroom culture of the world.