Pay to Pee

In Africa we often had to pay to pee. It wasn't expensive -- usually only 10 peswas. And if you needed newspaper you had to pay more for that too. I carried baby wipes and kleenex everywhere with me so I thankfully never had to resort to using newspaper. 

You could usually just pop a squat wherever you were, but the large crowds weren't always conducive to this. Ghanains had the freedom to do such things... but we stood out and attracted too much attention. 

Voiding where these signs were posted resulted in a fine. And it was an especially hefty fine if you were white. This wasn't an issue as I usually require a little more privacy. 

We usually only had to pay to pee when we were traveling... which ended up being a lot of the time. I tried to avoid using any kind of facility as much as possible. This sometimes meant starving and dehydrating myself, but you gotta do what you gotta do to get by. Oftentimes the bus wouldn't even stop anyway so you'd be sitting there doing kegels for hours on end. This didn't work so well the time I ha the runs on our way home from Bolgatanga... but that's a story for another time. And we thankfully had our own trou trou.

These are some of the establishments I had the honour of relieving myself in. These were the nice ones even. There were some nasty nasty ones. Nasty ones. Oftentimes it was just a hole in the ground. This was my least favourite because then you had to aim and that is a skill that was highly underdeveloped at the beginning of the trip. It also didn't work so well with explosive diarrhea. The other problem with the little holes was that they were usually in the homes of people we were visiting... which meant you couldn't pass it off as someone else. It was obviously the inexperienced white people. Woopsy.

This one was especially nice. The red wall was a nice touch.

I spent four hours on a bouncy trou trou trying to hold my bladder and when we stopped to buy some snails I jumped out... there was sadly no where to go to the bathroom so I somehow managed to communicate with a ghanaian around me. We communicated that I needed to pee (which is very important because pooping would require a different facility) and the kind gentleman led me to a little cement slab with three walls. Try peeing on a cement slab without having any back splash... it's not possible if you are a woman. And the worst part is that it isn't just your own urine splashing back at you! I vacated the facility to find a crowd of women and children waiting for me. They all came up wanting to shake my hand and talk to me.... all I wanted to do was wash my feet with my wet wipes, but I had no such luck. I did manage to do it before I returned to the trou trou, but it wasn't soon enough for my liking. Those cement slabs soon became common for us... and they never became more pleasant.

We usually peed in the urinals because the above "toilets" were too expensive. In the urinals there was a trough with a raised cement slab that you were to stand on. You could see outside the urinal if you were standing so we would all squat down and do our business. A Ghanaian woman walked in once when I was squatting as she laughed at me. She boldly pulled up her skirt and went about her business standing and facing the trough... rather than being reverse as I was. So that was how it was done! That changed the way I peed for the remainder of my time in Ghana. If I could recommend anything it would be to wear a skirt if you are required to use any of the aforementioned facilities. The reason for this is that you can pee standing up and you don't have to worry about getting your shorts wet. Really, a couple dribbles in your underpants is the least of your worries (for the record, I never dribbled in my underpants).