Aunt Potty

My mother always calls the bathroom the potty. So my cousin started calling my mother Aunt Potty. I am pretty sure she hates the nick name. Sorry mom.

But, in honor of my (I hope not now publicly humiliated) mother, I have lovingly named my new toilet “Aunt Potty”.

You might think it strange to give a toilet a name. But I am now living in luxury, and so I shall shout my new beloved’s name from the tin rooftops.

“AUNT POTTY! AUNT POTTY!”

But call her Aunt Potty, porcelain throne, toity, john, what have you, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Though she doesn’t really smell that sweet. In fact, though I have proclaimed her to be luxurious, A.P. is literally just a toilet. No running water, no flushing, not even a seat or a lid. Just the porcelain pot with the hole coming out the back that I have to pour buckets of water into to flush. In fact, one not versed in Mozambican toilets, might walk in and scoff Aunt Potty. Shame on said ignorant visitor. I pooped in a hole for two years.

But, in addition to her primitive design, to make matters worse, the man who installed A.P. went a little wild with the cement.

“I found some extra tile in the shed, do you want me to tile the floor too?”

“Well of course I do!” I logically responded and thought to myself,  “I am going to be living such a fabulous life as I do my business!”

The next day…

“Was he drunk when he cemented the place?” asked Iraque, disgusted with the not so handy work of the handy man toilet installer.

“Well, I mean, maybe. I guess he was drinking while he was knocking the hole in the wall and then drinking more when he was slopping cement every which way,” I responded innocently.

Beer + Construction work=disaster. Who knew?

So, now, I have a bathroom that looks like someone splattered diarrhea all over the walls (FYI just to clarify, it is NOT in fact diarrhea, but rather cement splatters). And my so called “tile” is really just broken bits of clay pots which have been smothered in cement globs and haphazardly placed around A.P.  and the bath basin.

But honestly I will take a cement explosion, manual flushing and occasional bum slips into the seatless pot over the alternative.

I actually rented the house under the faulty impression that it had a bathroom. Well, I suppose it did have a bathroom in the sense that it had a place to take a bath. But as I curiously poked my head in for the first time and saw only a yellow basin on the floor where I could stand and take a bath (at the time covered in 12 tons of gecko poo which I was lucky enough to later get to remove) I turned to Iraque and asked,

“Um, where do you do a #2?”

“What do you mean?” He responded confusedly and poked his own head into gecko poo haven aka my so called “bathroom”. “Hmmmm, me too, I thought it had a toilet. I will talk to them.”

So I moved in and stayed under the pretense that my toity would be installed shortly.

And it was…. But in the mean time I had to use the communal bathroom.

“In Mozambique, every bathroom is an adventure,” Shannon, the new Volunteer in Chidenguele who is replacing me at the school, so aptly stated after surviving the shared toilet for the first time.

But I wouldn’t call that bathroom an adventure. I would call that an devilish den of fecal matter where children pee all over the floor, the noxious smell seeps into your pores poisoning you with airborne particles of foreign poo and pee, and mosquitoes deviously linger in the toilet boil awaiting the moment your bum hovers close enough that they can to suck your booty blood.

Had they not installed my wonder pot, I would have followed the little neighbor girl’s lead and started pooping in the yard.