The
building had become even more run down since I was in town five years ago, but
it was the only public washroom in the vicinity of where we were walking. As we drew closer to the cracking walls,
the smell assaulted our noses . The door
marked ‘women’ was boarded up, so we all crept towards the men’s side. The guys offered to go first to check out the
situation… which was definitely the chivalrous thing to do.
They came
out having scouted the situation and reported back, “It’s pretty nasty in there. Many of the boards are rotting out to the point they are no longer strong enough to hold a persons weight as they balance over the hole. People have given up even trying to use some of the stalls… so you have to watch
out for piles of waste as you go, and it gets darker the further back you go. Avoid
the first three stalls, since there is no stable place to stand… try the second
and third ones from the end."
Their
wives looked a little shaken at the prospect, only having been in county for a
week, they were still not use to the whole squatty potty concept, which, based
on the primitive nature of where we were standing, increased in grossness by a
factor of 100. The ladies retied their
headscarves so that their mouths and noses could be better covered from the
stench that lay before them.
Minutes
later they came out gasping for fresh air and visibly shaken by the crude
washroom they had just been forced to endure. As they squirted tons of flowery smelling hand
sanitizer out, in hopes of washing away the memory, a Tajik man giggled from where he had sat watching the whole
scene.
With
renewed energy we took off walking and turned the corner of the street. There gleaming in front of us in all it's freshly
built cleanliness was a brand spanking new public washroom. No wonder the Tajik guy was laughing so hard,
he had watched these young ladies struggle and chock, knowing full well that if we
all took ten steps to the left, our eyes would have alighted on a much more palatable
solution.
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