The toilet

The toilet was not our favourite place in the village. They had pit toilets, but the pit was not very deep. The surface was so close that if you dropped something valuable down there, you could retrieve it (not that you would really want to though!!). So with the shallowness of it all, it meant that the bugs (cockroaches, flies, maggots) were near the top and there was a very strong odor (I hope you're not eating while you're reading this!).

One time I was going to the toilet and as I stepped over the hole, a whole swarm of flies flew out and I made a quick exit! As I was walking back to the house, a young girl asked me, 'Yu pekpek pinis?' ('Did you already finish in the toilet?'). She asked because she had seen me go there and I came back so quickly, so I had to tell her that I saw all the flies and ran away. They must have thought, 'If it's that bad that they don't even do their business, we'd better do something' because later that day, the girl's father gave Correna the last of their fly spray for us to use when there was a lot of flies.

Another time I went after dark and there was a frog in the toilet hut…maybe you can ask me about that story. It doesn't seem right writing about it, too much detail that I feel strange about writing about on the Internet! Anyway, I generally avoided going to the toilet after dark, and maintained a constant state of under-hydration just so that I didn't have to go very often!