How To: Potty Train Your Baby

Let it poop in the yard.

My new house is a 1 bedroom apartment in a little compound of other apartments, rooms and  reed roof round houses. Most occupants are teachers, not native to Chidenguele, and renting rooms only because their profession has brought them here. One woman, however, is a local.

She is actually from Manjacaze, about 40km down a dirt road from Chidenguele, but her husband and his family are from Chidenguele. Why, you might think, is a local renting a room in Chidenguele? Don’t she and her husband have a house?

Well, you might not be thinking that, because in other countries it is quite normal for a couple to rent a house/apartment. However, in Mozambique, you live with your family until you can afford to build yourself a house. Except in the larger cities, people never rent if they have family they can live with. The result is that you literally see little, one room houses with 16 people of all shapes and sizes happily coexisting as they fight for floor space.

So, why is miss local renting a room?

Apparently her husband works in South Africa – very common here – and she was living with his family. Well, his mother, as mother in laws tend to be I’m told here in Mozambique, was not very kind to her new daughter. In fact, they fought to the point that the husband moved her right on out of the house and made her my new neighbor.

Moral of the story: lady local (whose name is Lucrencia) has three kids. One of these children is almost 2 years old and no longer wears a diaper. However, instead of teaching her to use the potty (which is shared by multiple tenants ie it is caked in years of never cleaned poo and pee… which might be the reason she doesn’t let her child go near it) she just sends the big bellied little girl into the yard.

“Lersia, take off your underwear and go pee!” she commands, and the little girl, clad only in panties because she refuses to keep on actual clothes, strips off her only item of clothing and toddles out to the yard, where she squats down and wees in the sand.

Ok, fair enough, I have been known to pee outside sometimes, especially when I was a child.

However, one day, I found the little lady squatting in the sand making a #2. Since she isn’t my child, and her mother was nearby, I didn’t scold the little one for the undignified dooty. “Her mother will surely see and that will be that,” I thought.

“Leursia, have you finished pooping yet?” the little pooper’s mother yelled across the yard.

“Her mother knew she was pooing in the yard? She actually had instructed her child to drop a dues in the dirt? “ I contemplated in horror as I watched Lucrencia take a stick, scoop up the toddler poo, and drop it in our garbage hole.

“The worst part is that she just dropped it in the trash hole,” Iraque commented, “instead of burying it.”

Really? That’s the worst part?