“It feels like we’re in a prison. life is too difficult.”

“It feels like we’re in a prison. life is too difficult.”

Figure3: Anti-racism slogan at the entrance of migrant worker’s shelter.

The toilet is a foundational starting point where each of us deals directly with our bodies and confronts whatever it provides, often on a schedule not of our own. It is undoubtedly the same for workers in Portugal. But under such inhumane and imbalanced resource distribution, including but not limited to toilets, accessing it comes up with more concerns.

Is it clean and hygiene that matters merely to me or anyone? Do I have access right to a certain one? or by money, identity? Will there be a proper “Western toilet” on which we can sit, or will we have to squat? If I am from a squatting part of the world, must I risk physical contact with a public appliance? Are we allowed to put the paper cover on the toilet seat? Will there be paper covers I can put on the toilet seat? Do I have to risk physical contact with public equipment if I come from a non-sitting place in the world? 15

For an Indian or Muslim, running water through wash pipes or wiping with a flushing tube is extremely necessary. Think about it; that is why almost all the migrant workers shared that their expectations were inconsistent with the reality of new life abroad in Portugal. Many people find that the preparations they made before travelling - the information they participated in and the predeparture plan - are not fully prepared for them.

Life beyond work.

Fundamentally speaking, the toilet created a huge abyssal line16 between local Portuguese and migrant workers. This means such serious exploitation has changed the way they are living compared to ordinary individuals.

This phenomenon has elicited a core question to each and everyone of us: What about their life beyond in the working field and house? In the city of Beja, where the migrant workers live, based on a search result from Google Maps (the application migrant worker use daily), there are only two public toilets available to use for the entire city. And the allocation of migrant workers indeed radicalised the imbalanced toilet distribution among the general crowd. This unpacks the structural issue relating to toilets in Portugal. Sadly, toilets are a site of inequality not only for unhoused people. Even within the wealthy parts of the world, toilet suffering occurs. People in poor neighbourhoods have fewer places to go, in part due to the lower density of restaurants, bars, shops,

The question comes from Greed, Clara.15 Inclusive urban design: Public toilets. Routledge, 2007.

Beyond abyssal thinking. https://www.eurozine.com/beyond-abyssal-thinking/16

and public restrooms. Besides picking and choosing to whom courtesy will be extended, commercial establishments are not always open, and indeed those in poor neighbourhoods commonly have irregular hours. Low-income urban areas tend to have high rates of overcrowded housing, defined by more than one resident per room, which makes toilet access a scarcer resource than it might be in homes with more toilets17 .

Furthermore, given the large existed migrant worker landlords who were always reluctant to do the necessary maintenance and repairs to reduce costs or kick out the unwanted tenants, a functional toilet is less likely to be found in the poor and precarious houses. In addition, many policymakers are unfamiliar and indifferent

to these issues and inclusive

solutions. They often do not have enough inclusive training opportunities. The excluded groups were rarely consulted about their own

lives. Here in Portugal, at least in the town where most

of the workers are allocated, the situation may have fluctuated for anyone who is considered not to belong to the place.

Also, it is universally recognised that in most parts of the world, men and women use toilets differently; one indirect consequence of this difference in toilet behaviour is that men's and women's public toilets typically remain separate at a time when few other public spaces are segregated by gender. A further consequence is tension between men and women over the toilet.

The research fieldwork didn’t get the chance to connect to the female worker directly, but there is indirect evidence of the injustice and exploitation of female workers. Female migrant workers tolerated other "lighter" forms of violence. In cases like Portugal, female workers know that their success and survival depend on the kindness of their employers, this involved the control of the

Figure 4: The gate of migrant worker’s hostel.

The Politics of Going to the Bathroom. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/toilet-urination-disability-access/17

mafia, as previously mentioned. When employers have all the power, women have minimal choices: appease the employer as much as possible, and if the appeasement fails, find a way to go home or escape and lose their legal status. For irregular immigrants, they know that they may be arrested and deported at any time, which makes them more afraid of complaints. This has happened countless times and there have been many instances. Based on the local NGO principal, a migrant woman who had a Portuguese boyfriend here was shipped back to Thailand so that she wouldn’t tell him she had to pay €6000 for the privilege of coming here and being exploited to try to protect her social worker had placed her. in a women’s shelter, the hardest worker said to him and she made this gesture(a knife on the neck) because she was terrified for her family at home.

The irregular status of many female and male migrant workers also prevents them from contacting the Embassy - many people think the embassy will reject them because they do not emigrate through appropriate channels. In addition to the vulnerability brought by immigration status, for female immigrants, especially those engaged in remote work just like the intensive olive agriculture picking, employers can impose additional restrictions on them, coupled with their isolation, leaving them in an invisible situation.

But their injustice when accessing toilets in the city unfolds a larger issue world-widely. That is, no matter in rich places or poor, and more than anywhere else in public life, toilets inscribe and reinforce gender differences. The markings are for "Men" or "Women. There is not just a difference but also a hierarchy, given that women must wait in their separate lines, whereas men usually do not have to wait at all. This "great binary," much less the inequality with which it is often associated, is neither natural nor inevitable. The contributors to this book raise alternative possibilities, both as cultural reformulations and architectural alternatives. The toilet allows us to ask what it might mean to provide equality precisely. This issue becomes complex if it is granted that groups include individuals who are different in fundamental ways.

In the book Land & Animal & Nonanimal by Anna Sophie Springer, she argued that we do not simply sculpt the world to our liking and stop there. Our environment, in turn, is constantly sculpting us; the changes we make to organisms have consequences for how humans conduct themselves. That is particularly true for the blooming monoculture sector in Portugal. The author used the human domestication of dogs as an example and asked: to what extent have humans been domesticated by dogs? in this case would be the toilet. The toilet seems irrelevant compared to agriculture, but all kinds of post-natural formations, existence and landscape of the earth.

Also, James Graham, in the book Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, asked to think about climate change through molecular composition, including atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, methane, etc. We increasingly understand ourselves, our identities, and our political realities through the frame of the molecule. These provide a novel approach to critical engagement in terms of human technology and productivity advancement through the representation of indirect exploitation, even an object, as a way to expose the injustice. More specifically, the development of agriculture, how we are influenced and defined by science and technology and new things that end up ruining our way of going to the toilet. I reckon the similarities between the two paragraphs can help me better understand the role of human beings in natural formation, the climate in the technological explosion era, and how the thing we create are reshaping ourselves.

There is no shared experience because of the diverse cultural background that workers come from. That may apply to all communities and political interests. The key is to tell humans from nonhumans, the toilet does. We could solve the problem, at least in this case, of unequal access, by ending separation.

Figure 5: One migrant worker shared hands with Local NGO principall.