I could envision how men could aim for that hole in the ground, but, but—what about women?

Before Christmas, I told you about my too-close-for-comfort encounter with a hippo—a hippo that was charging me, only a few feet away.

Dave and I were participating in our three-month orientation for living and working in Africa, and one morning several of us had unzipped our tents and headed for the outhouse, only to find that a couple of hippos grazed among our tents. With long, razor-sharp tusks in mouths that open four feet wide, hippos are deadly. (If you missed it, click on I didn’t tell you the whole truth about a hippo charging me.)

When it became clear that hippo had not killed me or our fellow orientees, we all remembered we’d originally planned to head to the outhouse. By then, for some of us doing so was urgent!

       

A row of outhouses lined the edge of camp—rough wood planks and black toilet seats. The place was dark, stinky, and full of flies. Ugh.

Actually, we had two rows of outhouses. The second sat equally close to our site, but I wondered why no one ever used them. One day I checked them out.

I pulled open the wooden door and—I’d never seen anything like it. I saw only a hole in a concrete floor.

Only a hole.

       

In the floor.

But how did people use it? I stood there trying to figure it out. I could envision how men could aim for that hole, but, but—what about women? (Click here to see illustrations of pit latrines.)

Hmmm. Little by little—okayyyyy—I pictured how a woman might use such a hole.

I didn’t include the following in Grandma’sLetters from Africa, but this is what was going through my mind:

Think about it. If you were a woman wearing a long-ish skirt and underpants under that skirt, you couldn’t just pull them down and stand over the hole and pee—your underpants would be in the way. They’d get drenched.

If this makes you uncomfortable, skip the next five paragraphs. But if you’re curious, read on.

So, understand: You’re a woman wearing a skirt, underpants, hiking boots, and socks. This time, picture yourself—not standing above, but squatting over—that hole in the floor.

If you were to pull your underpants down around, say, your knees or calves, and then if you were to spread your legs and squat over that pit in the floor, what would happen to your underpants? They’d get stretched way out of proportion.

Within a few days, you’d have ruined the elastic. And if you had three more months of orientation in the bush, you really wouldn’t want to ruin the few pairs of underpants you owned.

Given that, the only way I can envision a woman using a pit latrine is this: 

You’d have to remove your boots (because it’s not easy to remove underpants over boots), and then you’d have to remove your underpants and figure out where to put them to keep them out of the filth on the floor because there are no hooks or shelves or anything. And then you could hitch up your skirt and squat down over that hole. What a hassle!

So there I stood, like a statue, staring at that hole in the ground, picturing myself or any other woman trying to use it, when suddenly the scene solved a mystery.

This explained the footprints I saw on the toilet seat

in the guesthouse bathroom we’d shared with others back in Nairobi.

The other rooms had housed Africans from rural places,

and it dawned on me,

standing in that outhouse at Lake Naivasha,

that some of them didn’t know how to use our kind of toilets

any more than I knew how to use theirs.

I shoved the door closed

and hurried back to the other outhouses,

the foul-smelling ones with black toilet seats.

From that moment on, those black toilet seats were,

in my opinion,

things of beauty.

(from Chapter 1, Grandma’s Letters from Africa)

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