The Best Medicine

There are just some stories that can only be truly related in person. You need inflection, you need gesticulation, you need good solid cursing. A few stiff drinks don't hurt, either. If you are reading this, know that you are going to ask me to tell you this one again, in person. This could be the defining point in my life. Get comfortable.

I traveled last weekend, from Friday to Monday, visiting friends and Togolese family during a 4 day journey to say my goodbyes before I leave next week. My final stop-over was in Dzigbe, the highest village in Togo, right beneath the peak of Mount Agou, the same village I stayed in for 3 days in December of 2008. Christina and some friends had visited while I was in South Africa and she promised to bring me back for one last visit before I left. We passed a pleasant evening full of grain alcohol, mashed tubers and scuttering cockroaches to awake to a cool Monday morning. The morning passed in a normal fashion - light breakfast, hiking (what they call 'walking' here) to say hello to friends and family, and a scary end-of-days thunderstorm that detained us until about noon and then a large lunch.

Pretty routine, so far, yeah? But good, now we're caught up.

Now, take stock of what you are doing right now. Sitting at work, at home, maybe drinking a cup of coffee, maybe listening to some music, maybe a Kenny G Christmas record from 1989, maybe thinking about how nice it would be if him and Yo Yo Ma would just go ahead and make out already. Now imagine if, 10 minutes from now you were transported somewhere deep, dark, smelly, you were covered in shit, surrounded by huge, satan-worshiping, radioactive, mutant roaches - and you had to poop really quite badly. Hard to fathom?

After lunch, I felt nature creeping up on me, and decided to saunter down the path to the little shack covering the 3 ft wide pit we used as a toilet. Upon my approach, I imagine the tired, neglected latrine had something of an existential crisis. Faced with the prospect of staying a latrine for the rest of its days, a sad looking affair, all wood and rusty sheet metal erected over a large hole spanned by 10 or so pieces of wood, with no chance of an independent career change, it saw, in me, a way out. Or down, I suppose, depending on where you're standing. Giving up the ghost in the most monumental latrine-fashion imaginable, as I stepped in the entire floor gave way and sent me into a head long dive straight the fuck down.


I'm going to give you a second here. Take a breath. Unbeknownst to me, I now hear that this is a nightmare scenario for many people.


Standing up, I tried to take stock of the situation in the calmest way possible. Lucky for me, mountain people in Togo don't really use latrines - they're partial to rocks in the woods for their dirty work. I find drowning in a 7ft pool of liquid shit quite an undignified way to die. Unfortunately for me however, I was still AT THE BOTTOM OF A 10FT DEEP LATRINE WADING IN A FOOT OF PISS AND SHIT. Roaches and, oddly enough, crickets - huge 3in long black old testament looking fuckers- were running around everywhere and crawling all over me. Little built-to-scale-models of Mount Doom were sticking their peaks out through the liquid on the floor, I had no network coverage that deep in the ground, it smelled like a rotting goat, and I still had to poop really bad. Thinking about it logically, I knew the first thing that I needed to do.

I dropped trou and took a dump.

That taken care of, I stood up and noticed that there was still one giardia-yellowed board spanning the width of the pit, all that was left of the floor. Knowing that it would be my only way out, I gave a flat-footed jump an olympian would have been proud of and latched on, hoping that it wouldn't give way (the sick sucking noise that my shoes made when leaving the floor of shit gave a certain je ne sais quoi to the whole affair). Looking left and right, I used small grooves in the latrine walls as toeholds, each one harboring a dozen or more nightmare insects that crunched and squirted underfoot, and clambored my way to the top of that shit-streaked board.

I laid there for a moment, looking at the overcast sky, the wind rushing over the various liquids covering my body, cooling me as if I had just stepped out of a hot shower, and I began to laugh. Hysterical, maniacal, uncontrollable laughter that started deep in my gut and erupted out in rolling ululations that shook the slim board that was still underneath me.

Cause hey, what else is there to do?