Sticks and stones may break my...

See previous entry "water or paper?"

Last week we were holding kgotla meetings in Qabo and Grootlaagte. On Thursday night I stayed at J’s house in Grootlaagte, along with a young man from the Ghanzi Department of Wildlife and National Parks. We made supper and then talked as we sat in the dim candle light eating our goat meat, phaletshe (stiff maize meal porridge) and merogo (spinach).

The conversation turned, as it so often does, to comparisons of life in Botswana and North America. This topic is impossible to exhaust; there is always another cultural quirk that can be brought up for consideration. This evening I revealed that I had spent a year living in India, and they pounced on the opportunity to question about a new country. After a few rounds of fairly innocent questions, the guy from DWNP started looking a bit crafty. “So,” he began, already stifling a giggle behind his hand, clearly uncomfortable. “So I heard that… Over there… People, um, when they are going to the toilet, they… they don’t use T.P.” He paused, and J looked confused.

“No T.P.?” she asked.

“No T.P.,” he confirmed. He turned back to me. “I heard that they use… that they use water! And their hand!”

He burst out laughing and J joined in.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, they do. I did too, when I was living there.”

Shocked silence. Then more uproarious laughter. Spluttered bits of commentary, between guffaws: “Ahaha! Disgusting!” “But then their pants must be all wet!” “No T.P.!” “How do they eat!?” “I can’t believe it!” “WET PANTS!” “Where do they get the water?” “Everyone?”

After they had calmed down a bit, I explained how everything works; that I’d found it to be no problem at all; and that for India – a country of a billion, with extreme poverty, inadequate infrastructure, and no history of using T.P. – water actually made more sense. However, my audience was not convinced.

“But it’s not clean!”

“Well, you do splash the water a bit, and you only use your left hand… and then the left hand isn’t used for anything else, it’s considered the unclean hand, your right and is used for everything.”

J held up her left hand and turned her face from it, miming disgust. The man from DWNP burst out laughing.

“And the pants!” he said, “the pants! After you went to the toilet, you’d be – with the splashing – it would be -“ he gestured at his crotch and then started laughing so hard he couldn’t continue.

“All wet!” J filled in. “It would look like you – like you – AHAHAHAHAH!”

“Well, come on!” I reasoned, “What else can they do? There’s not enough T.P. for everyone! Even in Botswana some people can’t afford T.P. , and in India nobody is accustomed to using it. They’ve always used water. Surely you must have used something else in Botswana, in the past.”

They were silent for a moment, and then chimed in with answers.

“People in the village! You will find them even now – going out into the bush, squatting and then just rubbing their bums in the sand afterwards!”

It was my turn to be shocked. “In the sand?”

“In the sand! Just like that.” J used her hand to illustrate the motion of someone in a squatting position swinging their butt back and forth on the ground.

“Or some people will use rocks,” the DWNP man contributed.

“Or sticks!”

“But the sand, it can be a problem. Sometimes there are those sticky things – burrs – or thorns! - hiding in the sand – and then, OUCH!”

Both began to laugh again.

“What about leaves?” I asked, thinking this would have been top of the list.

“Yes,” J said, after some thought, “people also use leaves. But sometimes the leaves are not there.” She was silent for a moment, and then something occurred to her which brought upon even more uncontrollable laughter.

“What?” I asked, wondering what could be better than stones and sand.

“Well,” she said, “when I was in primary school, back in Gweta, we got those flush toilets for the first time. We - the children - had never seen them before, and suddenly the school gets these Western flush toilets. We thought they were amazing but we didn't really understand them.

"Soon, of course, they became blocked, and my friends and I got assigned to unblock them. So we had to reach in and find what was blocking, just pull out all the stuff and unblock those flush toilets. And we found that people were just treating it like the bush - we found everything in there! Sand! Soil! Stones! Sticks, twigs, grasses... Leaves! Even the old maize cobs! Pages from books, empty packets of chips, more sand... Everything you can think of! Nobody understood how these things worked and they had just been using anything to clean themselves, just like the bush... It took a long time for all of us to know how they worked, and every time they would block, just like that... full of sticks and stones!"

It was my turn to become incoherent with laughter.

After this discussion, J and the DWNP man conceded that there might be something to the water idea, after all.

"It is better than sand," the DWNP man admitted.

"Better than a maize cob!" J agreed, choking on giggles.

TRUE. Maybe this really IS my calling in Botswana.