A day with the man behind World Toilet Day
Mrs Eugenia Abu: It is interesting to listen to you talk about your passion with so much verve. There are people out there who say well what makes Jack Sim, what makes him tick, what does he eat, how does he stay so nimble. He travels a lot, what are his dos and don’ts for staying this young. Talk us through that.
I think if you are happy because you are doing things that you enjoy that keep you healthy. I don’t diet, I eat whatever I want, I have just eaten gizzard and they taste pretty good and I don’t exercise but because I travel I have to carry my luggage a lot and log it around and walk a lot, so I call that exercise.
But the main exercise is thinking and being very creative and the other thing is that I am in love every day with my wife and I am in a romance even when I am not with her. I feel I am in love, if she is in love or not, I don’t really care but I am in love because I can’t control her but I can control me.
And I always imagine that I am so lucky, marrying a very smart wife, she can give me all the freedom, no control and I can do what I want and the work is nice, the wife is nice, the children are nice, the money is not really a problem, so if you are happy and healthy, I think it takes care of itself.
In terms of sleep I don’t sleep a lot because there is always jet lag and this, change of timing and there is a lot of work to do but even that doesn’t really matter.
And in terms of number of employees, I employ one full time staff, Sarika and two part time staffs and I have hundreds and hundreds of volunteers and people come and work for free.
So the first time on the seventh year of the Water Toilet Organisation, I went to India and President Abdulkalam came to open it with the crown prince of the Netherlands, William Alexandra and it was a very big event.
And the crown prince asked me, so Jack where are all your people? And I said to him you are looking at all the people, it is only me and he was shocked, he said how could that happen, how could you have done all these things with just yourself and I said yea, that is the power of storytelling, you get other people to do it, willingly, happily and they pay you for it and they fly you there.
Today a Nigerian airline is my airline partner and Indonesia just told me City Link wants to be our ally, partner for Indonesia flight and we never solicit but Racket Benkazia and Likso and these people they call Gates Foundation for the World Toilet Summit in Nigeria, they call me and they say shall I give you some money for the event, I will say yes, I will take it and it to Upwash, I won’t keep it.
And people ask me why is it that you don’t want to make money out of this? I have been working 25years with no salary, free of charge. They said why don’t you just take a salary of whatever. I said no, if I take a salary people will think that I am doing it for myself, I don’t need money so I am okay.
Veteran broadcaster and writer, Eugenia Abu, sits down with a philanthropist, sanitation activist and founder of World Toilet Organisation, Professor Jack Sim, in an exclusive interview in Abuja. In a bid to help break taboos around toilets and make sanitation for all a global issue, the UN designated November 19th World Toilet Day. In this exclusive interview, Professor Sim talks about toilets, life, love, legacy, and how the UN got involved.
But if there is donation I will employ another person that might help but if they don’t come it doesn’t matter and so a lot of the time, NGO work is all about money and money and I try not to do that by staying frugal and leverage everyone.
Leverage everyone, great! Let’s talk about your wife, you talk about her in a manner that makes every man want to go and get a wife like yours; tell me what it was on the first day you met her, and how you have endured your relationship that makes you fall in love with her every day even when you are not there.
When I first saw her, she was wearing a red dress, with hair covering one eye, red lipstick and I was like hmmm. I don’t even remember the hotel, the coffee house that I met her and I am like should I date this girl?
But I was divorced the first time after one year marrying the wrong girl, so I said I better asked my brother to take a look. So I asked my brother and he says, she looks good you know, you should try her and so I dated her and then after six months we got married. Now we are married 31years.
Never quarrelled before, whenever we are not happy with anything, we stop talking and initially we stopped talking for maybe three, four hours, nowadays we stop talking for five minutes and then we come back very fast, so we have improved a lot. But very seldom we have disagreement anymore.
Tell me what should I be taking as Jack Sim advice for young man about how to marry the right girl.
You never marry the right
person, I mean if you marry the wrong person that’s very clear but usually you marry somebody, you give and take, you learn to adjust and a girl normally I mean women are different and men are different but normally a girl just want you to love her.
So if you love her like crazy, she is willing to do a lot of things for you and if you don’t know what to do, you just love her, it is so easy.
You said to me you don’t care whether she is in love or not but you are definitely in love every day with your wife and you said also about this time, when it is around her birthday you are hardly ever there and so she says it is okay, she has gotten used to it; what do you do to compensate when you get back home?
Nothing, 17th November is her birthday, 19th November is World Toilet Day, it is always somebody hosting World Toilet Summit or at least I am somewhere else and I have to put in my calendar to remember just before midnight Singapore time and call her but sometimes I fall asleep like two days ago, I got jet lag and I fell asleep and I woke up and seven hours later, I wish her happy birthday but it doesn’t matter.
I think that the one thing to learn is, even if she don’t forgive you, you have to forgive yourself and just imagine that everybody loves me and everybody will forgive me, then I can go and make all kinds of freedom of speech without being too self-conscious.
I want to return to you now and talk about how you felt when you were named the Time Magazine hero of the environment; how did you feel?
So you know when you get some fame or media publicity, the first thing that comes is like, wow, tell all your friends about it you know and after a while I feel a little bit uneasy to say Jack are you becoming an egomaniac? And do you enjoy this?
And then I say to myself, you are enjoying it and so if you enjoy it, is this good or bad? I say well, I don’t think I can stop resisting, I can stop myself for not enjoying fame.
But I have to shorten the time that I enjoy it so that I should be very happy that the fame legitimize the mission and bring some more supporters, make them safe to join me to do the good work, not because I am a great guy, you must know the difference.
And you know, this I have to remind myself initially every 20minutes because it just come back and then I have to remind myself every two days and then every time it happens I have to remind myself.
Nowadays I get skill, I get experience, I enjoy it little bit and I know why I am generating publicity for the work.
And from the outside people they might say, oh Jack are you trying to be famous and I say I don’t want to tell you no, I am telling you this is good for the work. But it really doesn’t matter what you think I know why.
Yes, you have earned it Jack, it is a good feeling to know that people understand what you do and legitimize it for the work that is the essence. You’ve written two books, are you working on a third one?
Yes, I find that writing books is very laborious and I am very lazy person, so I leverage again and I told one of these famous writer, his name is Wu Tai Ho and I said to him, why don’t you write my biography and he said yea, it cost 100,000 dollars and then I can write a very good book for you.
I said you know, I don’t like to pay you anything but why don’t you take all the royalties, it is 12% and I don’t need it and he says okay, fair enough, I am sure you are going to sell, so I will write it.
So it is like that, right, you don’t need anything, you don’t struggle, you pass the work to other people, so every week he interview me and we write the book and I know it would be good because I did a Japanese one already and the book sold 15,000 copies in Japanese and it says I am the author but actually I just went on interview with a PHP institute the biggest publisher in Japan and they took down everything, they wrote the book and they said this is your book and I am very happy. And now in Japan if anybody asks, who is Jack Sim? Somebody will say go read the book.
Talk to me about the attire you are wearing today, this is very Nigerian and it is certainly not Singaporean attire. You are wearing a red cap which is for chiefs in Igbo land and you are wearing the Nigerian shirt.
I was trying to buy Nigerian shirt…the selection was not very nice. I don’t know why everybody wears so nice and the shop don’t sell it and I realise that everybody has a tailor and it is strange because in my country nobody has a tailor, everybody goes to the shop and buy.