A Pretty Crappy Predicament

You know, there are some situations that you simply can’t prepare for...and you just have to hope that, when one of these crazy things happens, you’ll keep your head and figure out what to do, relatively calmly…

So, to set the scene, it’s last Tuesday, which was the last full day I spent at my future site before heading back to training in Wakiso.  I had gone to visit the two closest schools that Positive Planet, my host organization, works with in Kalisizo in the morning, and I was just hanging out in my house for a bit in the early afternoon before heading out to walk around town a bit.  Well, I decided to take a trip to the latrine before leaving the compound.  Right then, the only two people in the place were my landlady’s youngest son (who is probably about 3 or 4 years old) and me.  As I go out my front door and walk to the latrine, the boy sees me and shouts, “Mzungu,” so I turn my head and wave for a second as I continue on.  I get to the latrine structure, which actually consists of a total of five “stalls,” three used as latrines and two used as bathing rooms.  I had claimed the middle latrine stall as my own, getting a nice little lock to put on it and everything.  Anyway, I unlocked it, went inside, squatted down, and started going to work.  Within a few seconds, I heard the kid coming over…and he started playing with the lock outside the door.  This is a kid who will stand, with his siblings, outside my door in the evening and shout “Mzungu, mzungu!” the entire time I’m out in the front room cooking dinner.  Occasionally, one of the kids will give a little play-by-play of my activities.  For example, “Mzungu afumba!”  (“The white person is cooking”…as a side note, when I actually start living in this place for real, I’m really going to try to get these kids to call me by my name, and not my skin color…we’ll see how successful I am in this venture).

Getting back to the story at hand, against all odds, I maintained my cool, calmly telling the kid to stop playing with the lock.  Eventually, it worked, and he went somewhere else…Actually, I think he left the compound completely.  So, a few minutes passed in peace, I finished up, and went to leave…and, yep, you guessed it, the door wouldn’t open.  As the reality quickly set in that the kid had left the door locked from the outside, a few choice phrases came to mind.  But, as I shook the door and called out for help, I soon figured out that I was the only one in the compound, and it didn’t take long to move past the “Holy crap, that boy locked me in a smelly, fly-infested latrine that doesn’t even have a cover over the hole yet” stage and on to the “Okay, I’m locked in a smelly, fly-infested latrine that doesn’t even have a cover over the hole yet…how the heck do I get out of here?” stage.  So, I started to look around, and, lo and behold, I noticed that the walls of my latrine stall don’t quite extend the whole way up to the roof.  There is a little space, maybe a foot and a half or two feet, between the top of the wall and the higher sections of the sloping roof.  I quickly did a pull-up so that I could look over the wall and into the stall to my right, and the door to that stall was open (hallelujah).  Now, if I could just climb this six-foot, concrete wall, squeeze beneath the roof, and lower myself down on the other side, I would be free.  So, that’s what I did…pulled myself up (helped by a tiny little quarter-inch wide ledge that I used as a foothold), got one leg over the wall (at this point I was straddling the wall like I was riding a horse, with my entire upper body pressed against the concrete so that my head could squeeze under the lower parts of the sloping roof), dismounted the wall, getting both legs on the freedom side, and slowly lowered myself down, ensuring that both feet landing on the floor and not in the hole…and I walked out, back into the light of day.  I soon realized how dirty my clothes and hands had become, but, before I spent too much time dusting myself off, I experimented with the lock on my stall until I figured out how to position the lock so that it would be impossible for this same situation to occur in the future.  Luckily for the little boy, he was not around, because I’m pretty sure I would have brought to bear my entire arsenal of Luganda knowledge to explain to him what he had just done, and why it was bad.  Of course, with my currently limited vocabulary, it would have been something incredibly simple, along the lines of, “Bwe nkozesa tooyi, toteekwa okuzannya wano, kubanga njagala okusobola okukomawo.” (“When I use the latrine, you must not play here, because I want to be able to return.”)

At any rate, huge crisis averted (more or less), I didn’t have to try to break the door down or anything, and now I have a pretty freaking awesome story.  After we all made it back to Wakiso, we had some processing time on Thursday, during which I acted out what I have just described in front the entire group (easier than telling the story twenty times).  I even think some of my fellow trainees will now be entertaining (or horrifying, depending on your point of view) friends and family back home with that story.  As some others have said, maybe it’s a good thing that this happened to me and not someone else who might be a little more freaked out at the thought of being stuck in such a crappy situation.  Although it’s probably not how I’d choose to spend my Tuesday afternoons, it didn’t feel like a massive, earth-shattering moment, even while it was happening.  I knew there would be some way out at some point, and, luckily, it only took a few moments for that way to present itself.  Actually, to be completely honest, now that it’s over, I don’t really mind that it happened at all…it’s just a really fun story to tell (as you can probably surmise from the way I’m telling it).

Let’s see, can we draw any lessons from this?  Well, there might be a few things that could be applicable to my service in general.  For example, creativity and the need to think outside the box (or the latrine stall, whatever the case may be) could be important.  Perhaps most significantly, I think it’s pretty necessary to stay calm and to roll with the punches (or the playful whims of a little boy).  Thankfully, I’m not really big into panicking, which, I think, helped me to think through how to get out of there, and then how to prevent it from ever happening again. (On second thought, would the story be better if it happened more than once?  No, never mind, probably not.  “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.”)

At any rate, we are now back into the normal routine, training in Wakiso.  We’ve got about four more weeks until our swearing-in ceremony (when we officially become Peace Corps volunteers).  Oh, I almost forgot…on Thursday night, we got to go to a party at the US embassy in Kampala.  The party was in celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the Peace Corps and of USAID (US Agency for International Development).  It was quite a nice thing, with good food (I have to admit, all of the PC volunteers and trainees swarmed the servers as soon as they came out with a tray of food), and good music.  I talked to a couple of the Ugandan musicians, trying to figure out a good place to look for an instrument to try to learn.  I got locations of a couple craft stores/markets in Kampala that might work.  And, on the way home, the group finally discovered something that would make me speak up and be somewhat assertive.  Song lyrics…specifically, in this situation, Disney song lyrics (yeah, that’s right).  As a group of girls in the back of the bus attempted to get through “A Whole New World” from Aladdin, I found myself interjecting lyric corrections as needed.  And I have now secured a permanent place in Rebecca’s quote book for myself, with the exclamation, “It’s ‘I can open your eyes’ people.”  As I later explained the next day, there are a limited number of things in this world that I am passionate about and that will make me open my mouth and talk with some force.  One of those things is music.  Melody and intonation aside, if I’m going to have to listen to people trying to sing a song that I know, I at least want them to sing the right words.  J

All right, I think I’ve gone on long enough with tales of my adventures.  I will hopefully now have better access to the internet on a relatively regular basis, since I’ve got the necessary equipment, but, obviously, please don’t expect things everyday.  Oh, and I just got a letter from Mom a couple days ago with a bunch of questions that some friends have been asking…perhaps the next post will be geared towards some answers.

As always, thank you for everything you do, and for your tremendous support.  You’re in my thoughts often, and I wish you all nothing but the best (and safe, uneventful bathroom experiences).