Les Toilettes

            Living in India has made me realize how thankful I am for a lot of things.  I am so grateful for my family, my friends, the house I grew up in, the money I have for an education, and so on. That being said….India has also made me thankful for some things I wasn’t expecting to miss before I got here.  Number one on my list you ask? Public restrooms. 

Our Bathroom at Seva Kendra (Shower on Right)

            Bathrooms in general fascinate me greatly in this country – Not in a weird way…they are just different than in the United States.  The setup in most houses (and at Seva Kendra) consists of a toilet, a spray nozzle or a bucket of water instead of toilet paper, and a shower that is set up right in the middle.  The shower head is not surrounded by walls or enclosed in a bath tub like back home – it is simply set in the middle of the bathroom so that everything gets wet when you take a shower.  (See the picture at Left) Then afterwards you use a squeegee to wipe water off of the floor and maybe a cloth to wipe down everything else that got wet.  I have grown quite accustomed to this setup and I actually prefer it to the bathrooms back home.  Yup that's right. I love Indian bathrooms.   

Toilet Paper Substitute

Anyways, back to public restrooms.  For some strange reason, it is very difficult to find a place to use the restroom in public in the area we live in.  If you are a male, you simply go wherever you please.  Without getting too graphic, this practice results in what Heide has nicknamed “pee rivers” and “pee puddles.” (Although keep in mind we have only been to Kolkata.  The rest of India might be very different for all I know.) You get used to seeing stuff like this and it is only particularly disturbing when the streets flood and you have to wade through who knows what.  For a woman, it is much more difficult.  I have a lot of sympathy for the women who live on the streets.  They don’t really have access to toilets and are forced to be creative.  There are a couple of “Pay to Use Toilets” around but the condition of them makes me prefer to just hold it.  Most stores don’t have bathrooms and only some restaurants have them.  This was quite the deal breaker when we first got here but Heide and I have learned to adapt to it.  The key is to “Go before you go,” map out the closest restroom to where you are, and only drink enough water so that you sweat it all out – which isn’t difficult in this climate. 

            Yesterday a fellow volunteer asked me, “What is the first thing you are going to do when you get back to the United States?”  I thought about it for a moment and told her, “I’m going to head straight for a nice, clean, public restroom so that for the first time in 2 and a half months I can use a bathroom without worrying about what I’m going to catch or what I’m going to see.”  - And I was only half joking.  If only we had the spray nozzles....

Pax

Elaina