RR [The Toliet of Our Youth]

The Toilet of Our Youth
May 19, 2002

The walls were of concrete, unpainted but darkened by the years. The floor too was of concrete, but at least it was paved, that is why it had a certain sheen not unlike a wooden floor's patina from years of use. The door was of plywood, also unpainted while the only window was the jalosy type made of wood. The window had metal grills from the outside. It had the usual toilet bowl but alas it had no faucets. Its source of water is a pump --- called bomba --- from which we cajole water from the bowels of the Earth (actually, just from the water table) to spout into a balde (pail) by repeatedly and sometimes ferociously working on the pump by hand. Water was stored in tall plastic drums. A corner had a shelf for the shampoo and soap used by everyone who enters the room. This was the toilet of our youth.

It would have been an unremarkable toilet for the fact that it was the toilet I grew up with. And I suppose, I found it to be infinitely better than the one I used during the few summers our family would spend in my parents' province in Central Luzon. That one made for an unforgettable toilet experience. It was an outhouse with walls of sawali. You step into a floor of bamboos; in the middle of the floor was a hole in the ground about a meter deep. You also bring with you your tabo and pail of water, or else.

The toilet of our youth did not have a steady source of water from the manual pump. At times when water is scarce, we would have a variety of other sources, the most etched in my memory of which was our neighboring bakery's water froma mechanical pump. My brother Buboy (who was older by a few months; we were no more than 10 years old) and I would fetch water by the pail from this pump. It was, however, a problem for us how to transfer the water we fetched into the drum inside our toilet. The only logical way to do it was to haul the heavy pail from the bakery to our apartment going through the front doors. That was about a two-kilometer trek.

Or we could improvise.

My brother stacked hollow blocks under our toilet's window; we now could reach the window's ledge. Next he fashioned banana tree barks into half tubes that would run from the window into the drum inside the toilet. Now all we had to do was let the water from the pail run through the half tubes and voila, the drum inside the toilet got full.

In my young mind, it was ingenious as it was fun. Fetching water was no longer the hardest chore of my childhood.