iPoop

Author’s Disclaimer—this blog post is about poop. I do not advise reading while eating.

Peace Corps Volunteers talk a lot about poop. It can change from morning to afternoon here, and it’s a very clear indicator of the status of your health. Also, it happens to be in your face a lot.

Animal poop is everywhere on the street and your home because people live in very close proximity to them. People poop is also everywhere. Outside cities, there is little running water in Niger, and any relatively secluded area is a perfectly acceptable restroom.

Sometimes there are more official looking restrooms. On my bus trip back from Maradi after language emersion, I got up the courage to use one of the public rest stop bathrooms. Imagine a line of Port-a-Poties at the end of big concert. They’re heavily used and they smell bad, lots of questionable water/mud on the ground, no toilet paper left. Now imagine that when you walk into said port-a-potty, instead of the actual seat that you sit on, there’s just a whole in the ground, about seven inches in diameter. The whole is only about six inches deep and at an angle so whatever goes down is going to flow to some undisclosed area.

I entered the above-described latrine in a haze, having woken up from Benadryl-assisted sleep. The smell and general appearance of the latrine woke me up a little more, as I realized maneuvering this situation might take some thought. I started to pull down my pants and PLOOP! …That would be the sound of my iTouch, not my poop, falling into the latrine.

Now before you go ahead and judge me I want to remind you of the numerous times you’ve heard someone say, “My cell phone is amazing! I dropped it in the toilet and it STILL WORKS!”. Well, my iTouch is not so amazing because it did not survive the latrine fall, but I think it was worth the risk.

All this to say, I am now iPod-less. My iTouch is now on its way back to the U.S. for repair. I’ll keep you posted on Apple Support’s professional assessment.