Bathrooms

Several weeks ago I got the runs during an interview with a local politician.  We had just started our introductions when my stomach grumbled; embarrassed, I excused myself and my translator and found a cab, in which I sat down and closed my eyes and attempted to transcend my earthly form as the car inched forward.  After several minutes I told the driver to pull over into a gas station.  An attendant guessed what I wanted and pointed me towards a dismal grey door in a dark corner of a nearby garage.  I took a deep breath, plugged my nose, wiped the sweat off my face, and opened the door to the bathroom.

And it was nice!

Or, not nice, but really good for a gas station toilet.  Faithful readers of the blog will remember several bathroom posts from my time in China, a full nine months I spent paralyzed by the fear that I would have nowhere to do my business.  One of the most pleasant surprises of my weeks in the Philippines has been the overall quality of the restrooms here.  Often small, dark, wet and curiously free of toilet seats, the bathrooms here at least don’t have standing piles (or, worse, smeared tracks) of feces on the ground.  And that’s awesome.            

For those readers who think that my internship consists entirely of getting snacks from loan sharks and going to the beach, I’m proud to say that I spent my last three days entering data, making copies, getting laminations, training a group of sullen translators who put on sunglasses when they got bored, training another new group of cheerful translators, and doing interviews at three local banks and cooperatives.