My First Squat Toilet

[This is my first posting about guts.]

The first place I ever saw a squat toilet was in Tokyo. In the airport bathroom, May, 1982. Long rows of stalls in the women's room, just like in any American airport bathroom. But each stall door had a label, either "Western toilet" or "non-Western toilet." If I remember correctly, there were about equal numbers of each! I was seventeen years old, had never heard of squatting or anything. I was overcome with curiosity about what a non-Western toilet could possibly be and peeked behind one of those doors to find out. A single glance at a white porcelain flat thing on the floor was enough to scare me and I fled to a Western toilet. (I had just been diagnosed with colitis the year before; I think my bowel problems were beginning to affect me by this point in time.)

Eleven years later, somewhere in the Atlas mountains of Morocco, I finally used a squat toilet for the first time in my life, and it wasn't by choice. In colitis-related desperation I had found myself in a really icky, dirty, rural, impoverished dark place, with a flushable hole in the ground and a bucket of water, to which I had been ushered by a non-French-speaking Moroccan man. I remember being worried about germs, infection, disease, kidnapping, etc. So imagine my surprise when, upon "relieving myself" there, I found myself thinking: "Wow, that was so much easier and less painful than on the toilets at home!"