Those of you that have traveled in developing countries such as Honduras (and we don’t mean only the tourist spots that are like extensions of the US) have probably noticed that bathrooms are not the same. First of all, finding a public bathroom can be hard or downright impossible. If you do find one, you might realize that you have to pay to use it or at least pay to get toilet paper.
Here in Honduras, it is the same. When you go to a mall or nice shopping center in the big cities, you will find nice public bathrooms, and you can usually use them for free (and they may even have toilet paper). Outside of those and chain restaurants like McDonalds, bathroom quality tends to deteriorate at a fast rate. For example, the bus station we use to go to and from Tegucigalpa and Catacamas. It is considered a nice bus here in Honduras and is a direct bus with one stop in between (the buses do not have bathrooms either). But use the bathroom in the bus station and you will find that it is pretty gross compared to our standards in the US. There are toilets and a big urinal for the guys but no running water. You flush the toilet by pouring a bucket of water down it which you retrieve from a giant barrel located in the bathroom. If you have never done this, it actually works quite well but the cleanliness of the bathroom is pretty bad, even though they seem to be mopping it nonstop. Oh, and bring your own toilet paper, chances are that the bathroom will not have any but don’t worry, they usually sell some nearby if you get desperate.
We don’t have any numbers on this but less than half the population in Honduras probably has a flush toilet with running water. The next step is having a normal toilet that you pour a bucket of water down after using it, in or outside your house. One step lower and you have the standard latrine with a hole in the ground and a hole up above to do your thing in, an outhouse basically. After that, there are fields, streets, parks, and wherever else you need to relieve yourself. There are many poor subsistence farmers and families that either don’t have toilets or don’t have somewhere to go in the fields so people just go wherever and whenever nature calls. Well, that and cow dung are two of the main problems with water quality here in Honduras. In a country with a lot of rain, all that excrement just washes into the rivers that towns get their water from. Sounds enticing, doesn’t it? But we will save that for another day and continue on.
The first time you see someone peeing in the street in broad daylight is somewhat shocking. Then after the fourth of fifth time you get used to it. It is not uncommon at all to see a car pulled over to the side of the road with a guy just peeing out in the open by his car, some people go behind on the tire or are a little more discreet but they don’t have rest stops here so you go wherever you need to. When Kevin went with the University students on a trip, the bus just pulled over and all the guys got out and basically lined up and peed on the side of the road. That is completely normal here. If a cop saw someone do that in the States, you could very well be cited and even charged as a sex offender, not good (you don’t want to end up on that website that tracks where sex offenders live just for peeing in public, do you?). This happens in the city too, not just in the country. The workers that come to get stuff from next to our house for the hardware store pee on the truck tires on the street in front of our house and we live in the middle of the city.
Now, peeing on the street in the open for guys isn’t a big thing. It’s not too often that you see a woman doing it. One way to avoid using the bathroom is to avoid drinking (Shannon does this every time we take a long trip). Hondurans, in general, don’t drink a lot of water. Most think gringos are weird for drinking so much water. We don’t know why, maybe because drinking water costs money or maybe its because there aren’t bathrooms to use but even people who are well off and can afford all the water they could possible want don’t drink very much water even though water is cheap. Our five gallon jug is just 65 cents. A liter bag of water is only 10-15 cents.
So far we have only talked about peeing in public. Other volunteers have told us about seeing people pooping in public but so far we had been able to avoid seeing that. That is until this morning. We went on our usual Monday morning run in the multi-sports complex/park, aka a giant grass field that we run around. On one of our laps around the field we could see a guy squatting just to the side of our path. It sure looked like his pants were down and as we got closer, sure enough, he was taking a dump on the ground about ten feet away from us. He didn’t seem worried about it and he didn’t seem to be drunk or on drugs either, just answering nature’s call in front of anybody who happened to walk by. I mean, couldn’t he have at least gone behind a tree or something or in a hole in the ground? The weirdest part might be how we reacted to that after living here a year. True, it was something we had not witnessed before but it almost seemed normal anyway. We just ran on by like normal and laughed and talked about how that was the first time we had seen that here. Hey, it all comes down to this: whey you gotta go, you gotta go.
On a side note, we are off to the Copan Ruins this weekend for Halloween, then to Guatemala and Belize for two weeks for some much needed vacation! Updates coming soon!
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