By ahblackwell
During orientation week, Doha, the homestay coordinator for the Center for Cross Cultural Learning, dedicated an entire portion of her session to bathrooms in our homestays. Squatting low with her elbows on her knees for support, Doha demonstrated how to use a “Turkish toilet,” while the picture of the porcelain hole-in-the-ground illuminated on the TV screen behind her. If only I had truly known the project that the toilet in Morocco would become during our pre-homestay orientation session. Perhaps it is good that I did not.
I am one of the lucky students in my program whose family has both a “functioning” shower and a Western-style toilet. The term “functioning” is put in quotations here because the concept of a shower is very different in Morocco. Our bathroom is located under the stairs to our terrace and is slightly bigger than a closet - the majority of it is obstructed by a slanting ceiling. The shower head was installed almost directly over the toilet; however, I am the only one in my family who seems to use the actual shower head. The rest of the family uses the faucet and a bucket to rinse themselves off until they have a chance to make their weekly trip to the hammam (public bath). I have adapted to the Moroccan sense of showering somewhat quickly; I wash my hair about twice a week in a shower that lasts five minutes, at most, and save the majority of my hygiene routine for my two-hour hammam visit on Friday afternoons. A few weeks ago, I took my longest shower at home, yet: fifteen minutes. Eight of those minutes were dedicated to washing two pairs of underwear and three pairs of socks (when it rains all week, laundry is not an option), and the water was running for maybe five minutes, total. Morocco has made me incredibly resourceful.
Having a Western-style toilet in your homestay is pretty essential. The average American student spends many-a-night hunched over the “john”. Though the doctor who spoke to us about food safety during orientation week referred to diarrhea as “rolling a bankrupt” in a Casino, I would say the more appropriate metaphor would be comparing it to a rainy day - it happens all the time, and no matter what the weatherman says, there is no way to predict when a thunderstorm will hit. Luckily, none of my horror stories have involved an unfortunate amount of time being spent squatting over a Turkish toilet, which is something that cannot be said for every student in our program.
During my week in the rural village of Ait Ouahi, located in the Middle Atlas Mountains, I found myself luckier than many of my fellow students, once again. The family with whom I lived for the week had both running water and a Turkish toilet that was in a small room connected to the house. Although their “bathroom,” lacked soap or any sort of sink and required shoes to avoid hazardous slipping, its roof and running water made early morning trips to the loo in the freezing rain easy to handle. Other village powder room accounts included smelly Turkish toilets with no running water, outhouses that required putting on shoes and a jacket to make the trek to the bathroom, and even a few houses with no toilet, whatsoever. However, as had been proved several times before, this semester, when taking bathroom breaks on-the-go in Morocco, sometimes nature provides the cleanest seat - and the best view.
The Western-style toilet comes in little use outside of the home, for this reason. Public restrooms in most corners of the world are not places where you want to spend more than the time it takes to pee, wash your hands, and open the door using your foot. In some of the bathrooms I have visited throughout the country, this takes a whole new meaning. “La toilette?” can get you to a restroom in almost any cafe or restaurant, but you can never be sure of what you might find when you arrive. Generally, I look forward to Turkish toilets in these situations because they leave me physically the furthest away from whatever might be emanating the smell from bellow.
The relieving presence of highway rest-stops and gas stations with a W.C. are few and far between while traveling throughout the country, and in several emergency cases (there are a lot of bathroom “emergencies” when you’re traveling on a seven hour bus trip with thirty-five people) we were forced to use what nature provides. On the very first day of our Southern Excursion, one of the members of our group announced that she could not wait any longer to use the bathroom. Responding instinctively, the bus driver pulled over on the desert-bound highway and signaled for her to head out and find the nearest tree. The look of terror on her face suggested that she had never taken a leak in the presence of trees, before. Unfazed, several of us took advantage of the opportunity and climbed down the bus stairs and over the guardrail and marched into the barren wilderness in search of cover. Although it was not the first time in my life I found myself squatting among the flora and fauna, it was the first time I had done it in a circle of eight or nine girls all using the same group of shrubs. After several group excursions and many pit-stops on the road throughout the past several months, making a privy out of a tree has become second nature to all of us. And, needless to say, we know all the members of our group on an unusually detailed level.
Although my experiences in Moroccan commodes - or lack there of - have been memorable, they have also taught me several key rules of travel:
- Bring toilet paper with you everywhere... perhaps even your house (and a plastic bag so that you don’t leave any trash behind you!)
- Hand sanitizer is your best friend
- Women do not go to the bathroom in groups to gossip; friends accompany you to hold the door shut, to provide toilet paper in the chance that you have forgotten yours, and to laugh at you when you pee on your shoes
- Strong thigh muscles are more beneficial than they may seem
- Modesty is not the best policy