It is Always Unpredictable

I knew before coming to Azerbaijan that I was worried about the bathroom situation. The anxiety comes in part from never having been outside of the Western world of flushable toilets, and in part because every time I need to use the bathroom in this country, it is a toss-up as to what I am about to walk into. Some of them (luckily, like my own house) have modern, Western, flushable toilets. Few, no matter how nice they are, have toilet seats, and that is one thing I still have not figured out. Of the normal toilets, some flush, some need buckets for manual flushes, and some just sit on top of holes in the ground. There are bathrooms with really nice porcelain everywhere and extremely clean, just of the squat variety. Some just are not clean. And then there is the outhouse. The dreaded outhouse. My experiences so far have brought me to the conclusion that while some outhouses don’t leave me with the feeling that I should immediately shower and rid my body of all toxins in inadvertently soaked in by stepping foot inside of the claustrophobic wood box, many unfortunately do. And that is the situation I found myself in during my dreaded “outhouse” incident.
My host parents asked me to come along over to their daughter’s house one Sunday evening. She lives in her husband’s house with their children, and his mother and father (Almost always the case if you are the youngest son of the family – my host brother, who is 27, lives in our house with his wife and two kids). Now, I don’t particularly like going over to this house in general because the father-in-law smokes in the room where we all sit and have our food and tea (It is also the only room for guests so you cannot escape to the kitchen) and because the daughter happens to also work with me at school and gets so nervous to speak English, there is a lot of confusing conversation. Nevertheless, we had been there a lot longer than I had expected and it was nearly eleven p.m. when I decided to bite the bullet and ask about using their bathroom. The problem is, in Azerbaijan, it is a slight faux pas to even talk about the bathroom or anything having to do with it. And amazingly, it seems to be only the foreigners who ever need it when they are not at home (I think my family has super human bladder strength). So after two hours of being uncomfortable, I got up the nerve to ask if I could use their bathroom, and the daughter said, “I’ll bring you out there.” Which I knew only meant one thing: Outhouse. And, boy was I right.
After we tramped through the entire orchard, I was given the flashlight for some lighting in the dark abyss. But after I rolled up my pant legs and stepped out to widen my stance, the floor board broke from under my leg and I not only fell on top of the hole that everyone pees (and other gross things) into, but my leg also went under the outhouse. I thank all of my lucky little stars that this one was not the kind that was near overflowing because my leg did not touch a thing. But I screamed, and my host sister/counterpart came running in to help, but then could not stop laughing at what a ridiculous situation I was now in. I felt a little better after that because she was so embarrassed about what happened she couldn’t stop laughing. I was also embarrassed and highly grossed out about falling in an outhouse and would have probably started crying if I hadn’t done a little laughing about it. I asked her a million times over not to tell the seven people back at the house what had happened, but she couldn’t quit giggling and it was inevitable. I ended up dousing my cuts and bruises in antiseptic, and washing my jeans twice(which is not an easy task when you are hand washing) from essentially sitting on the floor of an outhouse, but it has proved to be a fairly hilarious story for my family to repeat, and another good, “Did that just happen?!” moment for my Peace Corps service.