The Outhouse Keeps The Score

Content Warning: Bodily fluids

I’ve been asked on more than one occasion how I go to the bathroom as a blind person, and while I’ve given a variety of answers over the years, I usually respond like this: In the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, everyone goes to the bathroom blind.

We didn’t have running water in the rural interior of Boulemane Province, where I was born and raised, which meant that we didn’t have flush toilets. We didn’t have electricity, which meant that we wouldn’t have been able to see our toilets after sunset even if we’d had them. We did have flashlights, but the women rarely used them for fear of drawing unwanted attention. Plenty of men had nothing better to do after dark than to skulk around outdoors, waiting for women with full bladders and empty hearts to come along and swoon into their arms.

We didn’t use toilet paper. Most of us didn’t even like to use leaves, which were prone to tearing at inopportune moments and, anyway, weren’t available all year round. Instead, we used stones. I used to spend hours crouching by the river, selecting the smoothest ones that I could find, the ones that children in post-industrial parts of the world might’ve used for skipping, and stockpiling them in a secret location. Even these tended to leave scratches. Imagine what tattered assholes those who came after me and found only my rejects must’ve had!

Even though stones were available year-round, we didn’t keep them in well-insulated storerooms. We left them on the ground or in the streams until they were needed. As a result, they reliably scorched or froze our most sensitive parts, depending on the season. Still, it was better to lay hands on an unbearably hot or cold stone than on a reptile, or an amphibian.

The snakes were the real threat, but the toads could be just as frightening. In the dark, their wrinkled, lumpy bodies could easily pass for snake heads. You never knew what you’d grabbed until it was too late. Some people never did make it back from their late-night trips to the bathroom. We would find them later amid the dry scrub grass and stones, their swollen hands punctured by little fangs. Hypothetically, grabbing a toad could be just as lethal if you happened to have a heart condition, though I don’t know of anyone from the mountains who died that way, of cardiac arrest. Usually, the worst that would happen was that the frightened toad would deploy the only defense mechanism at its disposal, urinating on the hand that squeezed. This could still be profoundly discouraging, given why that hand had been fumbling about in the dark in the first place.

Even by local standards, I was a weird kid. When the sun rose, the other children would venture out into the fields to play soccer, using the heaps of drying excrement as goalposts. I never got invited to play soccer. I was an outcast. An orphan. My mother had died. My father had abandoned me. My relatives called me an evil child. I had to entertain myself in other ways. Sometimes, I would wander through the fields, studying the droppings and trying to guess who was responsible for each little pile. The color of the stool and my knowledge of what different households had eaten for dinner the previous evening would serve as clues. Beets turned the feces dark red, I discovered. Alfalfa and other leafy plants made it green.

One day, not long after I hit puberty, my father’s family got tired of me, and I was packed off to live with my mother’s. My maternal aunts and uncles enjoyed comparatively modern lives. They lived in towns with paved roads, electric lights, and running water. Some of them had cars. Some had televisions. None of them had flush toilets, but neither did they spend their evenings contending with snakes and toads and wily suitors. Many of them had squat toilets set into the floor, but even those were not connected to the sewer system. Also, there were no ventilation fans. Only when they needed to pee did they use the squat toilets. When defecating, they took a different tack. They used plastic bags.

This was hard for me because I was never bag-trained. I was simply expected to know what to do. From watching my cousins, I gathered that you were supposed to select an empty room, often a storeroom where dry goods were kept—E. coli was afraid of my mother’s family, evidently, not the other way around—spend a few hurried moments squatting over your plastic bag, then tie it off and hide it in the trash. Even though everyone used plastic bags, everyone was also ashamed of using plastic bags and only too happy to bury the evidence deep in the garbage can.

To defend against all possible contingencies—diarrhea, for instance—I always made sure to put my bag into another bag in case the first one had a hole in it. To this day, I’m constitutionally incapable of putting anything into a plastic bag without a second bag to go around it. When preparing to travel, I put my shoes into a plastic bag, then put that bag into another bag in case there’s a hole in it. When selecting fruit at the grocery store, I put the fruit into a plastic bag, then put that bag into another bag in case there’s a hole in it.

“I’ll put the printer in a plastic bag,” my husband recites dutifully as we’re packing up to move, shaking out a black garbage liner big enough to hold our HP, “then put that bag into another bag in case there’s a hole in it.”

Though I managed to condition him to double-bag everything Pavlov-style, it never occurred to me to explain why holey bags trouble me so until I started working on this essay. Only then was he enlightened.

When I was seventeen, my life took an unexpected turn: I was blinded by a relative and abandoned by my family. I became homeless. People often ask me what it was like, adjusting to blindness. They never seem to know what to say when I answer that it wasn’t that bad. What I mean, in part, is that it wasn’t that bad compared to abandonment and homelessness.

Blindness presented me with plenty of logistical challenges, but I would rather deal with challenges of that sort all day long than with the social stigma and emotional agony of being abandoned in a country where abandonment is unheard of, or homeless in a country where only drug users and the mentally ill end up homeless.

People often ask me what it was like, adjusting to blindness. They never seem to know what to say when I answer that it wasn’t that bad. What I mean, in part, is that it wasn’t that bad compared to abandonment and homelessness.

Similarly, the question that people should be asking in regard to defecation is not how I go to the bathroom as a blind person, but rather how I deal with other people having gone to the bathroom—specifically in the small towns of Morocco, where the plastic bags that don’t make it into the trash often end up littering the sidewalks and streets. For several years, I felt as if I were wandering about in a never-ending minefield. I always did my best to clear the sidewalks ahead of me with my cane, but there were never any guarantees. Once, I stepped on a bag full of hot liquid—maybe a mixture of urine and feces, or maybe just diarrhea—which had been bloating in the sun, causing it to explode. My legs were splashed and splattered, as was the hem of my already-dirty dress. I had no choice but to visit one of the public baths and beg them to let me in for free. Fortunately, I knew a woman who worked there. She took pity on me.

In the big cities—Meknes, where I completed my high school diploma and an associate’s degree, and Rabat, where I earned my BA—things were a bit easier. Most Moroccan urbanites have indoor toilets. You don’t find used plastic bags lying around on the streets of those cities.

Personally, however, I remained toilet-less. I would sometimes use public toilets, or go to the bathroom while visiting friends, but the closest I ever came to having a toilet of my own, before coming to the US in 2017, was during a brief stint in a house whose owner, having rented out all its other rooms, decided to make some extra income by converting a downstairs water closet into yet another bedroom. He covered the hole in the floor with plywood and put it up for rent. For a few weeks, this was my bedroom.

The space was so small that I had to sleep sitting up with my back to the wall and my arms around my knees. There was also a leaky pipe in one of the walls, which was constantly blooming with mildew. I had to be careful not to stack my Braille books against that wall so that they wouldn’t be ruined. None of this bothered me. I was ecstatic to have a roof over my head. I saw no reason to complain.

In 2017, my years of toil and sacrifice paid off: I received a letter of admission to an MA program in the United States. This turned my life into a bureaucratic whirlwind. I spent two months traveling the capital, scrambling to get all my papers in order. By July 10th, when a plane deposited me in Northwest Arkansas, I’d gone from total ignorance of passports and visas to being an expert on every sort of paper one can imagine—except for toilet paper.

Back in Morocco, no one had bothered to teach me how to use the plastic bags, and now, in the US, in the large, communal house where I found myself living, no one thought to tell me how to operate a Western toilet, either. Left to my own devices, I did what I’ve always done: I deployed the scientific method, developing and testing hypotheses, acquiring empirical data through trial and error.

My first line of inquiry involved the application of warm water. This method is popular in Morocco, and indeed throughout much of the world. I even know some Americans who came to prefer using water while living abroad and have continued to do so since returning home. The problem is that most American bathrooms are not set up to accommodate cleaning oneself this way. The sink is often situated at an awkward distance from the toilet. No one leaves plastic pitchers lying around. The toilet bowls are much too high, leaving little room for proper washing. There are no bidets.

Faced with these obstacles, I soon switched to using wet hand towels. This worked fairly well in the short term, as long as I only had to pee, but it soon became clear that I wouldn’t be able to go on reusing these towels indefinitely, even if I didn’t smear feces on them. Throwing them away didn’t seem to be an option, either, since there was a limited supply.

I desperately wanted to ask my housemates how they cleaned themselves, but I was far too embarrassed. I kept my questions to myself. I kept experimenting.

One day, while sitting on the toilet and groping about in the dark as usual, I happened upon something new: not a snake, not a toad, but a cylinder of tissue paper wound around a cardboard tube. I tore off several yards and set to work seeing what this new material could do. To my delight, it performed adequately. I wiped my bottom, stuffed the used toilet paper into the trashcan, washed my hands, and went on my way.

Unfortunately, the bathroom didn’t have any windows. It did have a fan, but I had no idea how to turn it on, or even that it existed. The next time I went to the toilet, the smell was unbearable. I could hear flies. The damaged tissue in my eye sockets began to ache and burn, aggravated by the powerful odor. I held my breath as long as I could, tore off several more yards of toilet paper, washed my hands, and once again went on my way, leaving a second soiled wad in the garbage can, atop the first one.

This went on for several days. The owner of the house was frustrated, but she had dozens of international students living under her roof and no way of knowing which of us had introduced this unhygienic custom. I couldn’t have been more embarrassed if I’d been caught brown-handed. Every time I went to the bathroom, my face burned with shame. Before long, however, the owner called a household meeting and, with as much tact as humanly possible, initiated all of us into the Lavatorial Mysteries.

Even then, it took me a few days to figure out that after you’ve put the paper in the toilet, you’re supposed to flush. In Morocco, servants are a fixture of domestic life, and I entertained vague notions of a nighttime porter going about from house to house, entering strangers’ bathrooms and taking care of their waste for them. With time, however, I came to understand that the rugged individualism common to so many aspects of American life applies in the bathroom, too, and before long, I’d mastered all the ins and outs of this new system and was proudly flushing on my own.

If you were to see me using toilet paper today—which I hope you never do—you’d think I’d been doing it all my life. I am a pro.

“But how?” inquiring minds want to know. “How do you know where it is when you’re blind? How do you know when your hands are clean?”

Life is short. If I’d wasted time getting offended by other people’s stupid questions, I never would’ve gotten answers to my own. The notion that blindness, of all things, has been the biggest challenge that I’ve had to overcome, the one and only obstacle between myself and easy use of the municipal sewer system, always makes me smile.

“Be grateful,” I tell those inquiring minds. “Be grateful for your toilet. It’s been there for you all along.”