Shit

My brother-in-law Tony warned my husband that he might not want to visit the gents’ toilet. We were on a cycling trip in the UK and had just finished morning coffee at a lovely café overlooking the River Tone in a little town called Taunton. Ignoring his advice, Steve returned with a wry smile and agreed that the turd in the toilet was indeed very large. Much merriment was shared as we contemplated the difficult task that lay ahead for the café staff in attempting to clear the toilet of its hefty load. Would they need a knife or perhaps blast it with hot water to break it up?

Toileting in India was always a challenge in 1977, when Steve and I backpacked our way through south east and central Asia to Europe and the UK, but one experience stays with me more than any other. We travelled on an overnight bus from Bangalore to Goa. Early in the morning, a comfort stop dropped us in a small barren looking town called Hubli next to an open field at the far end of which was a toilet block. We descended from the bus, weary from the muscle-aching half sleep that comes with travelling at speed on pot-holed roads, and started to walk along a debri-laden path that ran alongside the field.  As we did so, we were confronted by the image of a noisy, angry mob of men who chased and killed a mangy dog on the field. Gaunt and dishevelled, the men hit the dog repeatedly with heavy blocks of woods, the creature’s body bouncing up and down with each deadly strike. Perhaps the dog had done something to make them angry, but there was something about their vicious determination which made me wonder whether it might be their next meal.

With eyes turned away, and my heart still pacing from this shocking scene, I made my way to the women’s toilet block. One hand clutching toilet paper in my pocket, I tentatively stepped into the L shaped concrete building.  A shaft of sunlight cutting across the entrance revealed sloppy piles of shit lying on almost all of the available floor space. My second hand went straight to my nose to offer some protection from the nauseating smell, and I tightened my toes in my shoes in an instinctive but futile attempt to protect my shoes from treading on the squishy brown mess.

By this time, we had been on the road for a couple of months and had become accustomed to the awful smells and sights on offer in public toilets.  However, nothing could have prepared me for what I saw as I turned the corner into the main area of the toilet block.

Squatting on the footholds of each of the five door-less cubicles were old women. Each was gently swaying backwards and forwards, her bare feet gripping the porcelain beneath her, in order to keep her balance. Each was sound asleep. With grey hair pulled back in a neat bun, each was wearing a simple white and spotlessly clean cotton sari.

This was a perfectly awful personification of the utter hopelessness of poverty; it was also a picture of grace and beauty.

During this trip we discovered that toilets came in a number of forms in Afghanistan. Our entry into the country was via Peshawar, Pakistan from where we travelled to Kabul in an old truck that was laden with a miscellany of plastic and wooden wares that bulged over the sides of the vehicle and doubled its height.  Although the distance along the Jalalabad Highway through the Khyber Pass is only 200 kilometres, the trip took about 8 hours. The terrain was rugged, the road narrow, steep and winding, and at times the driver needed to edge the truck through highway passages that threatened to disgorge its precariously packed load.

Our driver had offered us the lift ‘baksheesh’, and his generosity extended to also inviting us to have some of his hashish. While we didn’t share this part of the journey with him, we somehow managed to engage in congenial conversation for most of the way, using hand and facial gestures, about Afghanistan, his truck, the Khyber Pass, his wife and kids, our relationship, our travels, Australia.

Half way through the journey, we stopped to eat, and shared a steaming hot chicken stew and flat bread with him and an afghan policeman who was also passing through the area. The place was a lone mud brick structure, just big enough for the four of us to sit on the straw covered earthen floor. The meal was cooked by a local tribesman on a woodfire, and its aroma and taste were gently delicious and restorative. I was just recovering from a bout of Delhi belly and this was the first real meal that I had been able to eat in about a week.  The conversation, challenged by our lack of a common language, was again halting but warm, the situation strangely free of any sense of menace that the policeman’s uniform and gun or the truck driver’s supply of hashish could have created.

Toilets were a rarity in this rugged, arid, mountainous terrain, and along the Jalalabad Highway there were few places behind which to easily hide. In addition, we did not see many other women travellers and there were certainly no women in this tiny outpost on the Khyber Pass. But on this day, there was a toilet. So, before having the meal, I made my way along a narrow rocky path to it. Located about 50 metres behind the café, the toilet was a rickety wooden box with a hole in the floor and two concrete footholds, just within reach of which was a tub of water. There was no door, and yet, as I squatted, I felt solitary, and strangely safe and private. All I could hear was the wind blowing furiously. All I could see was a wall of mountains.

Herat was a fascinating city and, while it was just as smelly, dirty and chaotic as Kabul, we found it more attractive. We walked along dusty, noisy streets and crowded alleyways, where most of the buildings were simple mud brick structures with cut outs in place of windows and doors. We made our way between colourfully decorated horse carts and clapped out old cars, a wheat grinder driven by a camel, and fly infested sheep and goat carcases hanging from hooks on the side of the road.  Narrow alley ways revealed noisy, messy bazaars full of all sorts of household paraphernalia from gaudy plastic goods to wool blanket shawls and densely patterned rugs, exotically engraved brass ornaments and leather goods, including a sturdy rectangular leather bag that we bought for Steve.

The city also indulged our taste buds with the country’s own form of mouth wateringly delicious roti – long narrow lengths of flat bread baked by being slapped onto the wall of a mud brick oven. Ours was purchased fresh from the oven – so it was piping hot, and the baker placed a huge chunk of sweet fibrous halva on it.  But the highlight of the city was the magnificent 800-year-old Friday Mosque, covered in intricate geometric patterned blue mosaic tiles.

Although our practice was to choose, not quite the cheapest, but the Lonely Planet Guide’s second cheapest recommendations, our options for accommodation were often fairly spartan.  The bathroom, laundry and toilet ‘amenities’ at the hotel we stayed at in Herat consisted of one grey concrete floored room with water supplied to a long trough which sat along one of the walls. Turds, large, deep brown and firm lay in neat piles on the floor.  I recall staring at them – there were so many they were impossible to ignore – and wondering whether their dark brown colour, solidity and sickly, pungent smell were a result of the high meat content of the Afghani diet.  On the floor near the trough stood a few bright red long-spouted plastic pots from which water was poured in lieu of toilet paper and flowed onto the floor. No doubt, at some other time of the day somebody would have the job of washing the turds away to become part of the local sewerage system. But in the meantime, we found a safe foothold at the troughs to wash ourselves and our clothes.

More than 30 years later, Steve and I did a six-week trip to South America. By contrast with our year of backpacking, this was not a $20 per day adventure: it was our reward to ourselves after having sold our company. As well as spending ten days cruising around the Galapagos Islands, and exploring the wonders of Ecuador, and a little of Chile and Argentina, we joined a small group of other travellers to walk the Inca Trail, a four-day trek through steep, rugged terrain to Machu Pichu.

According to the strict government regulations a maximum of 500 people that can be on the Trail at any one time, and they must also be accompanied by government qualified and licenced guides. Ours was a highly competent and wonderfully supportive woman called Maria. As well as providing an ongoing commentary about the Incas and their travails at the hands of the invading Spanish, Maria also indulged my delight in the complex and changing landscape. This was our first trip to South America and I knew next to nothing about any of the countries including Peru. So, while I was excited to discover the history and culture of the country, and enjoyed the novelty of seeing lamas nearby, including a huge one that prodded me in the back as I stood looking at an ancient Inca settlement, I was also gobsmacked by the natural beauty of the rainforests and the open rocky terrain through which we walked. And, an unexpected bonus was discovering that some of my favourite plants that grow in our garden at home are indigenous to Peru. I enjoyed the novelty of seeing fleshy-leaved begonias with delicate red, orange, pink or white flowers, and bright pink and purple edged flowers that protruded proud and strong from the centre of huge bromeliads, at each turn of the path.

Among the government regulations affecting the trek was one limiting camping to specified locations, all of which had toilets, or access to nearby villagers’ toilets. Most of these could be flushed; some just made use of a bucket of water located inside or just outside the cubicle. One of the peculiarities of the toilets was that soiled toilet paper was not dropped into the toilet bowl but was instead put into a bucket that sat next to the squatting footholds.

When we arrived at each of the three campsites in early evening, the toilets were relatively clean. However, a visit by torchlight in the middle of the night was more problematic. And, by the following morning when the serious task of shitting typically took place, the toilets were breathtakingly awful. Once the door was closed, and the benefit of sunlight lost, the challenge was to disrobe without letting your trouser legs touch the floor. Imprisoned in this tiny dark chamber, thankful for the protection provided by hiking boots, the senses were assaulted by a thick smelly stew of screwed up sheets of wet, soiled toilet paper as well as ruddy, used tampons and sanitary pads, all of which spilled over the bucket and onto the floor.

The fourth and final day of the trek began in the cold darkness at about 3.00am. This was to enable us to reach Machu Pichu in time to see the wondrous ruins emerge from the mist with the rising sun. Keen to avoid missing out on this experience, Steve and I secured a spot towards the front of the queue, which, within minutes, swelled to about 100 trekkers, all of us donned in familiar brands of warm clothing and hiking boots and carrying day packs, ready for the final stage of our pilgrimage.

Shivering with cold and nervous excitement, we eagerly waited for the signal to start walking, when I was suddenly gripped by stomach cramps. Reluctant to lose our place in the queue, I nevertheless realised that I just had to find a toilet as quickly as possible.

Even with the light cast by head torches, it was difficult to find any of the campsites carefully hidden from the trail.  After about 200 metres, the twinkling of torchlights to my right revealed the first toilets. These were the men’s and would have been fine, but they were all occupied, as were the adjacent set that were for women. My stomach cramps threatening to explode, I was desperate to find a loo, when I suddenly saw a huddle of young women standing near a third block.  They were American, I would say in their early to mid-twenties, and from their new colour coordinated trekking gear, and refined hairdos and makeup, almost certainly city girls – and probably university students.

‘Are any of these free?’, I anxiously asked. ‘Well, yes’, one of them said squeamishly, ‘but you can’t use them. They’re disgusting’.  ‘Ok’, I said and raced past them into the nearest cubicle. It was awful. The floor was awash with putrid stinking shit mixed with soiled paper and urine. The toilet seat was a mess of muddy shoe marks. But with the finesse of a trapeze artist, I squatted over the bowl and gave my erupting intestines full flight.

In India, Afghanistan and Peru, shitting was – and probably still can be – difficult to deal with. Often, toilets are at least uncomfortable, and sometimes seriously challenge not just our senses but also our perceptions of hygiene and cleanliness.  To a considerable degree, however, I have taken for granted that the ugly, smelly presence of human waste – along with dilapidated housing, dirty streets and disfigured bodies – is almost inevitable in an underdeveloped country.

To many travellers, San Francisco is an exotic place but perhaps not a place that one would expect to have to worry about public sanitation. However, an article in a recent edition of The Economist[1] provides a stark reminder of how powerful and yet fragile human waste management is as a measure of societal wellbeing, and more fundamentally, our understanding of the hallmarks of a civilised society.

Because of a complex array of market factors there is a shortage of housing, and in particular social housing, in the city. As a result, about 7500 people or nearly 1 % of the 871,000 that live in the US’s second most expensive city, are homeless. Last year, there were 16,022 complaints to the City and County of San Francisco about human waste on the streets. This represents a 2.5-fold increase in the number of complaints since 2011.

People are revolted by the presence of the stuff; some avoid sidewalks in fear of seeing it, smelling it or treading in it. To local residents and visitors alike – those that have places in which to live – it is an affront to their expectations of a civilised society. The homeless that defecate on the streets, probably wouldn’t disagree. However, they very likely also feel desperate, hopeless and abandoned by society.

[1] The Economist, June 2^nd-8^th 2018, page 30