How toilets tell tales

The second story: about bathroom facilities in Outer Mongolia.

In Ulaan Baatar there are lots of indoor toilets. The ones in public buildings like the schools are unpleasant dirty places but at least they have flush mechanisms, and anyone used to traveling in the developing world gets used to carrying toilet paper, antiseptic hand washing solution and baby wet wipes, so they are not impossible.

Outside the capital the towns tend to be communities of gers (yurts) with very few permanent buildings, and farther still from civilization are the camping places where the nomadic people spend a few months at a time. In the countryside there are very few flush toilets; in fact very few facilities inside buildings of any kind.

When we needed to go, we were told that the best place was behind a bush. After using one of the pit latrines I understood why that was sound advice. The latrine was dirty and fly-ridden, and not very stable. And that was in summer. The very thought of baring my cheeks in winter made me shudder. Mongolia is the coldest place in the world.

I think that the students in one of the schools we visited had likely given up on toilets, indoors and out. I walked out of a classroom, turned a corner and surprised a male high school student pissing in a corner. It explained why there was that pervasive stench of urine everywhere in the building.

I remember my father making judgments about the relative cleanliness of other races. Once, on an international buying trip, he and the other passengers on a grounded flight were assigned rooms and expected to bunk in with total strangers. He said he was greatly relieved to be staying with a white male. There were blacks and Asians on the flight as well. If he had had to choose, he would have chosen the Asian over the black man "because they are cleaner" .

I don't know what he based that prejudice on, but my own experience with people and their washrooms around the world has been quite different.

I don't know if you can generally judge the personal cleanliness of people by the state of their washrooms, but I suspect it might be a start. The washrooms in France and Mongolia were about equally dirty and either would win first prize as the least appealing in my experience.

In one seafood restaurant in Bretagne, the toilet used by customers and staff had no sink ... so how could the cooks and serving people wash their hands before handling food?

In contrast, everywhere I have been in Africa I have seen crude structures but very clean people who bathe far more often than most people I know despite the fact that they have so little water at their disposal.

They insist on hand washing after using the toilet and before eating or handling food, and they use one hand for personal toilet and the other for eating just in case they are unable to find soap and water immediately.

Their children go off to school every morning in spotlessly clean, freshly pressed uniforms, and when they enter the school dining hall a monitor or matron pours water over their hands into a basin as they scrub with soap. Only then can they can get their food and begin eating. The same thing happens in restaurants where the waiters bring the jug, soap and bowl to the tables.

My father didn't get it right. Of course he never traveled in Africa or in the East. But I wonder if he ever stepped outside the prestigious hotels when he stayed in France.