Bathing in Someone Else's Urine

And whoever's it is needs to drink more water because man is it sme-lly.

My casa de banho (bathroom) is a little house made of cement with two stalls, sheltered by a tin roof. Each compartment has its own little opening in the cement, ie there are no actually doors/locks and anyone or anything could walk in at any time.

The stall on the left is the shower, which is a shower without the shower if you get what I mean. It is a cement closet with one block to put your bucket of bath water on, and a slightly inclined floor which channels all the bath water runoff into a little hole in the back left corner.

The stall on the right, is the latrine which is a very not-fancy hole in the ground with a cement lid that has a small hole in the middle which one squats over to do his or her business.

Mozambican rule of thumb – the latrine is for #2, and the shower is for bathing and xi-xi (pee).

My rule of thumb – I don't like to bathe where I pee and if I squat over cement, pee ricochets off the floor and all over my feet.

So to my surprise, as I entered the shower on Saturday with my bucket of warm water in hand, there it was. I began to step softly, dancing around the dried dribbles, trying not to breathe too deeply, and quickly deciding not to remove my flip-flops for this bath.

And so I poured/splashed water on myself with a level of speed and precision like never before, hoping the water would lessen the wafting wee. No such luck. So I covered myself with a capulana, poured my remaining bath water over the uriny floor, in a last ditch effort to limpar, and semi-cleanly retreated to my house.

“Did you pee in my shower? Because I just took a 2 minute bath then had to run in fear from the smell.”

“Yes.”

“Ok ,well at least I know the source and wasn't washing in a stranger's dribble-drabble.”

But then, today, there was the pungent pee again. And it was stronger and stranger and not my boyfriend's.

And so the mystery of the malodorous xi-xi continues...