A Meditation on Toilet Paper
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: Yesterday we arrived in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and endpoint of our epic Balkan roadtrip. It’s a beautiful part of the world with a troubled past; we’ve very much enjoyed our month in the region. I will not, however, be sad to return our rental car. Balkan traffic has given me a whole crop of gray hairs and a stress spasm in my neck.
A Meditation on Toilet Paper
We once met a Canadian man who had built his own house in Ecuador. He explained to us an important fact about septic systems: if they’re too small, toilet paper won’t break down. If you want to be able to drop toilet paper in your toilet, your septic tank has to be large enough to handle it. And the bigger the tank, the more expensive the system.
I haven’t flushed toilet paper down the toilet since we left Madrid. I think that was about six weeks ago? I don’t mind putting TP in the bin for a while, but eventually it does get tiresome. Dropping it in the toilet and flushing it away is so much easier.
Do I sound like a spoiled princess? That’s because I am. I was born in a country where flushing the toilet paper is so normal we never even think about it. I’ve met plenty of Americans who were shocked and disgusted the first time they were told not to flush the toilet paper. But in much (most?) of the world, it’s not an option. Putting anything other than human waste into the toilet will break the system.
It’s one of the many, many small privileges of being born in a wealthy country: large septic tanks and wastewater treatment plants. We take these things for granted—so much that we don’t even realize there are places where life is different.
In Algeria, we were able to flush the toilet paper as long as we were in our Marriott (at least, I did, because there wasn’t a sign forbidding it), but away from the hotel things were very different. Not only could we not flush the paper—there wasn’t any. As a matter of fact, there weren’t Western-style toilets, just squatters.
Our tour guides and drivers—Billel and Haroun and Said and Amin—were a hard-working group, smart and generous and solicitous of our comfort (to the extent that comfort is even in their vocabulary). They were all working for one young man, Omar, who is busting his butt to build a successful tour company. Even without Covid, it’s an uphill battle, because—to be frank—Africa. I don’t imagine he’ll ever make the kind of money our driver in Italy made, taking us to see the Amalfi coast in a plush, air-conditioned van (but Omar will work twice as hard).
I’m not suggesting we pity Omar. I’m suggesting we reframe our perspective a little: instead of thinking of Africa as disadvantaged, think of it as normal, and ourselves as having extraordinary good luck that we did nothing to earn. There are, after all, far more people in the world whose lives look like Omar’s, than people whose lives look like mine.
The Constantine Marriott gave us a welcome plate of fruit when we arrived; we picked at it for a couple of days, but never quite finished it, because we were out on tours all day. The housekeeper left the dishes in our room for three days, until I finally called the front desk to come remove them, because we were developing a fruit fly problem. It’s not that the housekeeper was lazy—I’m not trying to accuse or blame, and otherwise she did a fantastic job—she just didn’t know. Perhaps it was a situation she had never encountered before. In a country where food is not necessarily in abundance, perhaps it’s wasteful to throw away leftovers. I try to think about it from her point of view: did she wonder why we hadn’t eaten that last brown-speckled banana?
Y’all, you just don’t know how much of a privilege it is to flush the toilet paper, or throw away the leftovers, until you can’t. It’s impossible to overestimate the privilege that each of us has, from the sheer luck of being born in not-Africa.
Take care,
Lisa
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