When Nature Calls...and I do mean nature.

When you gotta go, you gotta go, right? Even when "going" means availing yourself of a mud hut with a hole in the floor. Which isn't even really that bad. In fact, I've devised a rating system that scores the facilities at each of our clinics. It's the same as a ski run, with green being the easiest and triple black being the hardest.

A green bathroom would be a toilet of any description- flushing and seats are extras but not expected and toilet paper is simply unheard of.

A triple diamond would be the bathroom at Thumbwe. You need to go into the outpatient clinic, knock on the door (scare all the children in your path and attract a crowd of people) ask for the key, go around the back of the health center, jump off a small ledge and walk what feels like miles (but it probably like 100 yards) through the weeds to a locked outhouse. When you finally get there you expect that maybe this guarded treasure will contain a golden toilet seat, a cache of fine soaps and cremes, or at the very least some TP. Nah, it's just a hole in the concrete floor.  With bugs and lizards as voyeurs to watch you relieve yourself. And then you get to walk the key back up to the health center and run back to clinic.

So that unlocked mud hut you see above is actually a blue square. Clearly my standards are pretty low (evidenced by the fact that I raved over the facilities at a gas station in Zambia). Makes the bathrooms in my freshman dorm seems downright palatial. Heck, even the bathroom in the basement of 444 seems luxe. Nah, I take that back- I'd take a mud hut over that cell of horrors any day.