Businessman tells inspiring toilet tale

MANILA, Philippines - This isn’t another dirty toilet joke. But this story involves a dirty toilet, literally.

And this did not just happen to an ordinary guy. It happened to a prominent businessman in the construction industry way back in his childhood days.

Napoleon Co, owner of successful home and construction superstore chain Home Depot, recounts: “In my elementary school, the restrooms were, to say the least, ill-maintained and ill-equipped. Feces were splattered over the cracked tiles, and water barely flowed from the broken faucets.”

Co admitted to holding the call of nature until he got home as a child – an unfortunate habit he found hard to break while studying in provincial schools in Cebu.

“Tending to withhold bowel movement for years as a child, I was 14 years old when I started seeing pools of blood whenever I used the toilet. Until I was about 35, the hemorrhage did not stop,” he laments.

However, the ordeal merely challenged the young Co. Knowing how it is to be deprived of proper hygiene and sanitation, he vowed never to let his children experience the same thing.

Moreover, the reality of poverty struck him hard.

“If you ask me why I got into this business, I would say the toilets jumpstarted the vision. I was moved, through this painful experience, to help poor people out there who have had it harder than I did,” Co said. “I know how dehumanizing it feels to relieve yourself in the dirtiest of these places.”

Co inherited the family business – a quaint hardware shop in Cebu which sold tiles, bathroom tools, and materials. Through effective management, investment and lots of determination, the quaint family business bloomed into Home Depot.

With five branches in Metro Manila, Home Depot provides for virtually every construction need, from ceramic toilets to vinyl tiles to outdoor lighting. Locally, the superstores are frequented by both rich and poor as their one-stop construction shop.

When asked what makes Home Depot different from other hardware and retail stores, Co laughed and said, “Home Depot doesn’t just help its customers build houses, we help them build homes.”

He continued, “Somehow, from the vision of a clean, functioning toilet, I developed the promise of a clean, functioning, and accessible home.”

Staying true to his promise, he has engaged Home Depot into charity construction by regularly offering free construction materials and services to poor families and schools. Close to his heart, and his childhood, is his particular advocacy of building toilets for public schools in Cebu, Payatas, and recently in Zamboanga.

Late last year, Home Depot tied up with the A-Book-Saya Group (ABSG) to construct for free male and female restrooms in ABSG’s Kristiyano-Islam (Kris) Peace Library in Manicahan, Zamboanga.

The barrio, a known jump-off point of the Abu Sayyaf, has seen its share of kidnapping incidents.

ABSG, a peace and literacy advocacy group advocating education in war-torn areas in Mindanao, was hard-pressed in soliciting the needed funds to build a restroom in the Kris Library.

“I had read that the kids who visited Kris either did what they needed to do in the bamboo trees behind the library or – just like me – withheld the need until they got home,” Co remarked following talks with ABSG and Kris founder Armand Dean Nocum, a public relations executive and former reporter.

The meeting was arranged by Teresita Ang-See, founding president of Kaisa Para sa Kaunlaran Inc., an organization of Chinese-Filipinos actively promoting the integration of ethnic Chinese into mainstream Philippine society.

In December, Co sent to Mindanao toilet bowls and construction materials for the building of three restrooms in the Kris Library after learning from Nocum that although the two-story library was constructed in 2009, it remains without restrooms. Nocum was elated about Co’s help, saying that Kris scholars and poor Muslims and Christian kids who will take free computer lessons, avail of free use of computers and take catch-up reading lessons in the library will no longer need to worry about unsanitary bowel actions, infections – or hemorrhage.

Finally, Co stated, “It’s a small thing – to be able to build a clean toilet for a kid. But it is no insignificant thing to promote the health of a child, and ultimately, his growth and development, and his good future.”

If unhealthy sanitation and improper hygiene got in the way of these children, the future of our country, then the joke will be on us – that is, the “dirty toilet joke.”