More potty talk
On the generously called “road” to Ambo, we stopped at a small hotel along the way for coffee. (You can’t go anywhere without stopping for coffee here.) The villages outside of Addis string along the road in fitful starts and stops, like they are trying to decide whether to be a full-fledged town or just a pit stop. Donkeys trotting along with their bales of chat on the way to the market weave their way around jerry-rigged pickups and diesel-spewing Mercedes trucks.The homes are all one-story (and usually one-room) constructions of mud, hay, thatched roof, or if they are lucky, roofs of corrugated iron. Farther out in the country they are all thatched, round huts called tukuls, and this traditional style of building survives in the towns and even in Addis, in some areas. It’s interesting to me that the old way of doing things isn’t kept alive because it’s tradition, or a tourist attraction, or specific to an ethnic identity, but because it’s simply still how people do things: build their homes, carry their children, eat their food, carry their water, weave their clothes, etc. You can see the practices of 500 years ago walking down the streets at regular intervals, and for a history geek like me, it's fascinating.
Back to the hotel, and what I imagine must be a fairly typical story about a Westerner adapting to various non-Western interpretations of bathrooms. I had to go to the bathroom, and T. accompanied me there, as it was through a maze of small courtyards and passageways. He warned me that it was a “typical” bathroom that I should expect whenever I go to the field. I have seen some pretty substandard facilities, and am well accustomed to using the simplest one of all, Nature, but I have to admit I was not prepared for this. I walked in and nearly fell over from the stench. There were 6 stalls, of which two had doors, one of which was off its hinge and I couldn’t get past it. There was an inch of water covering the cement floor as well as, I discovered upon entering the only stall with a functioning door, piles of human feces. One couldn’t even position oneself to reach the hole functioning as a toilet. I stood there for a minute, trying not to retch, and quickly left, feeling ashamed that I couldn’t “hack it” in a typical Ethiopian bathroom. T. told me as we walked back that people don’t tend to ever clean the bathrooms because “they associate toilets and toilet functions with dirt.” Clearly a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I went to the common sink afterwards to wash my hands in the futile desire to feel clean again, and noticed hotel staff refilling plastic bottles of Highland Water with tap water and closing the caps very tightly. Highland Water is the brand that supplies my entire water intake, bought in bulk from the markets. There is a black market for selling reused water bottles as “bottled water” and I made a mental note to check my bottle caps very, very carefully.
Later on in the day, I went to see a crater lake called Lake Wenchi, and was traipsing around this unbelievable landscape (more on that later) when I realized with horror that I had to go to the bathroom again (I must really make a concerted effort to be utterly dehydrated when travelling.) I informed my escorts (both male--fortunately I don’t get easily embarrassed about things like this) and proposed that I find tree cover, in the hope that I might avoid the horror of the morning (and, more importantly, in the hope that I might actually be able to go to the bathroom.) A small, isolated village peoples the shores of this lake and had farmed most of the slopes, leaving most areas exposed either to the villagers watching us with amusement or to the island in the middle of the lake, which houses a monastery.
Eventually one of the villagers pointed to a very small thatched hut up a hillside and said that was a bathroom the villagers used, and I was welcome to use it. Desperate, I hauled myself up there and found a relatively wonderful situation: it had no door, there were a few slats of wood on the (dry and swept!) dirt floor covering a shallow hole, with lots of flies buzzing around but otherwise clean. I was intensely relieved, both because I could finally use the bathroom and also because I could use a remote village’s toilet with relative ease, and it wasn’t just my pampered Western sensibilities that had horrified me earlier in the day.
This is it, my favorite bathroom of the trip (I have a feeling this will be a regular exercise for me, but I promise to subject you to it only this once):
posted by Margot @ 7:51 AM
<< Home