Speaking About Toilets
Friday, March 20th, 2009When I was hitch-hiking in Europe in 1965, I came across the bidet…couldn’t figure it out. Somebody had to explain it to me. It’s an extra “toilet” in the bathroom that looks like a toilet except that it has no water in it and has a little jigger in the bottom that, when you push a button, sprays water upwards and cleans your bottom after you have defecated in the “real” toilet and then you flush. Many people over the world think Americans and people in the UK are unhygienic because they use paper.
Salon.com: Actually, we’re pretty disgusting, and we just don’t realize it.
We are kind of disgusting. I’m being polite about it. In water cultures like India, where you see all these people going to do their business with a little cup of water, they think we’re extremely dirty. They can’t believe it. Muslims, who have to be scrupulously clean according to the laws of the Quran, also think it’s kind of weird that we have this habit of using paper, and imagining we’re clean. We’re not.
Another thing. When traveling in developing countries, Americans come home wailing about the squat toilet. And actually, using toilets in the first place is physiologically” kind of impeding our normal bodily processes. You actually don’t want to be seated high up on the toilet. That’s not helping your evacuation processes,” says Salon. Read Salon.com on this most untalked about issue.
And just think of all those trees not to even mention the most polluting of all processes…the making of toilet paper out of virgin wood which is another long subject entirely.
My son lives in Thailand and when he married his Thai wife he introduced her to toilet paper. But she would wind it around her hand a dozen times and they were going through toilet paper like, well, water, as they say. Toilet paper is expensive in Thailand. I tried to show her how you use less paper if you bunch it up…not wind it…but she still used bushels of it. So now my son refuses to buy toilet paper. They have a bucket of water that they fill when waiting for the shower to get warm. Then they have a little plastic bowl they dip into the water in the bucket and use that with their fingers to clean themselves…like all the other Thais do who are not as turned off about their body processes as we are. Of course washing their hands well afterward…like we should all be doing anyway. In India, they only use their left hands…which is why they never eat with the left hand.
Think of it. Women use about six times the paper that men do. Another reason (I don’t want to gross anybody out) but the best reason for using water to clean is that a lot of urinary tract infections in women are caused by wiping back to front. This I was told by a urologist in Bangkok. ;- And afterward people put the paper in a basket because the sewer systems here in Mexico can’t handle all that paper.
And another thing about water. It is the dry season here now and people in the city’s colonias don’t have water. They have to buy 5 gallon jugs of bottled water for drinking and cooking from a guy who yells “AGUAaaaa” as he pulls his water cart down the street. My apartment has a cistern and water is delivered by truck. When the “tinaca” (tank) runs out on the roof, it is refilled by pumping water from the cistern under the apartment house up to the tinaca. Also, to save water, we only flush every 2-3 times after urination. As most everyone here says, “If it’s Yellow let it Mellow. If it’s Brown Flush it Down.
Not such difficult conservation adjustments we can learn from the rest of the world. I feel like a sanitation officer for the CDC after writing this post…or a urologist. 🙂
Zoe