Toilets and Pooping

written March 21, 2007


In case you can't tell from the title, this is going to be about toilets and pooping. If you don't want to read about toilets and pooping, please don't.

My first experience with toilets in Senegal was at the airport. Given that I have been thinking about doing Peace Corps and coming to Senegal for quite a while now, you might think that I would have considered the bathroom situation. But I didn't. At least not really. I knew we would likely not have flush toilets, but when I pictured the sort of toilet I would have in my village, I imagined something like the outhouses we used to have in summer camp: a board with a hole in it, and hopefully a toilet seat on it, inside some sort of little dark scary shed.

So I went to the bathroom at the airport completely unprepared. I walked in and found stalls... with porcelain holes in the floor. Apparently they use squat toilets in Senegal, which I had heard about before but had no idea they used here. There is a place to put your feet, and then you just squat down and go. Not as easy as it sounds. I think all of us who went at the airport peed on our feet a little bit. Gross.

But after about a day of using the squatters, I pretty much got the peeing thing down. However, pooping is a lot harder. It's hard (at least for me, at the beginning of this whole experience) to keep balanced for very long, plus your leg muscles get tired of the squat position pretty quickly when you're not used to it. So I really dreaded having to go to the bathroom the first few days.

Which may or may not have contributed to the fact that after being in Senegal about two days I quit pooping. I wasn't constipated, I just didn't have to go. For five days. In spite of the fact that I was eating a normal amount every meal. So that got a little scary. But I think it was probably because of the change in diet - tons of carbs, but very little in the vegetable and fruit department. Anyway, as of today I am back to normal. Which I am sure all of my friends here will appreciate, so they can finally stop having to listen to me talk about toilets and pooping.