"Potty" Break

Last weekend we took another trip up-country. A few hours into our journey, we pulled off at a gas station to use the bathroom. Gas station bathrooms are never a treat, but gas station bathrooms in a developing country achieve a class of their own.

The gas station manager walked us over to a shed, more a shack really. He opened the door on the left revealing a squat toilet and the overpowering stench of stale human waste. He then opened the right side door revealing a four walls and a wet floor that smelled slightly better. He explained that this side was "For urinate! For urinate!"

I decided to take whichever room (stall?) became available first. It turned out to be the "for urinate!" side. I took a deep breathe of the refreshing exhaust scented air outside and stepped in. The door didn't close all the way by itself, so one of the other girls held it shut for me.

It was dark in the shed, but still light enough to see. I looked around and tried to figure out the best way of doing things. There didn't seem to be any particular place "for urinate!" Rather, the whole place was wet and smelly. I picked a spot a decent distance away from the extra gross looking and smelling walls.

Being a woman and therefore not particularly talented at peeing standing up, I decided the best course of action was to just removed my shorts. It was a tricky process, keeping my balance without touching the wall and attempting to keep the grossness of the floor (and now the bottom of my shoes) away from my shorts. But I eventually did manage.

So, now that I was pants-less in a damp, dark shed in rural Africa, there wasn't much else to do but squat down and take care of business. While doing just that, I noticed that there was a sort of drain after all. There was a ground level hole in the wall that divided the "for urinate!" side from the squat toilet side. That meant all of the urine from my side of the shed emptied into the other side. Meaning that right now one of my girlfriends was peeing as the trickle of my pee sought its way to her drain. I pushed that thought out of my head after a brief moment of gratitude that I had ended up in the "for urinate!" side.

Having taken care of business, I was a little stumped about what to do with the toilet tissue. There was no trash can, certainly nowhere to flush it and I didn't exactly relish the idea of putting it my pocket to dispose of later. In the end, I just threw it on the floor. I did another complicated dance to put my shorts back on the least disgusting way possible and bid farewell to the "for urinate!" shed.

Once back out in the dazzling sunlight, I realized that despite my best efforts and wishful thinking, I had not entirely managed to avoid peeing on my own feet. No one else had either, so we passed around a pack of Wet Ones and agreed that this had been "an experience." Then we got back on the bush taxi and continued on our way.