And I m Ready to Poop My Pants Again

A Short Story about Pooping My Pants

Hi. My name is Erin, and I pooped my pants.

I was twenty one years old. I was in command of my ain movements and self. I had an accessible toilet.

And all the same, despite all logic that would explain otherwise, I pooped my pants.

Information technology was a sunny and clear morning in the Indian Himalayan foothills. I woke upward promptly at six am to my host female parent knocking on the window, bringing united states of america forenoon tea. Binaji'south tea was the best function of the mean solar day. Sweet, gingery season enticed me out of the bed I shared with two other American girls. I opened the shuttered window, thanked Binaji for the tea, and began to get ready to first the day.

Binaji, our host mother, was the granpanchayat, or mayor, of the village Reetha. Posted high in the Himalayan foothills, Reetha is home to mainly agricultural families. Peaches, pears, apples, cucumbers, plums, and cabbages thrive on the tiered mountain sides. That time of year, late July, the peaches were perfectly ripe. Binaji's peach orchard exploded with sweetness temptation. We came dwelling house each afternoon and she indulged in them with us, attempting to teach united states Hindi and laughing at our disability to pronounce the number eight. I had so many questions I wanted to ask her: what is it like to exist in a hamlet leadership role, peculiarly as a woman? How long has your family lived in this business firm? May I pet the dog? But I couldn't. She spoke no English, and I spoke no Hindi. So we ate peaches and tried to come up with innovative hand gestures to describe our hopes, struggles, and the globe around us.

The firm was white with blue shutters. Built of clay, the floors, ceilings, and walls sloped away from each other. The starting time time I walked inside was for dinner. Information technology was dark, and the simply light in the front room came from a shrine Binaji and her husband used for worship. A statue of Ganesha looked protectively over the room, ready to receive and ease all worries. Binaji was in the kitchen. She motioned for us to move closer. I had to stoop my caput to avoid bumping it on the clay ceilings above me.

The kitchen was unlike whatever room I have always been in before, and likely whatever room I always will be inside again. Information technology was dimly lit – the only real light source a small-scale fire and an electric lantern in the middle of the room. In the far corner sat a minor electric stove and a set of pots and pans. A large cabinet stood adjacent to it, so large it seemed like the room had been built around information technology – there was no way it could accept fit through the stunted doors. The shelves overflowed with containers of spices and vegetables and flour. Although none of the containers had words on them, Binaji ever knew just which ane held what. In the corner closest to the door there was a small wood fireplace, and squatting downwardly adjacent to it was Binaji. Years of fume from the fireplace blackened the wall effectually her and the ceiling above. When she moved, I saw a distinct outline of her shape forever immortalized in the wall behind her. She poked sticks into the burn to start a big enough flame, then rolled chapati and placed it on a small metal plate above the burn down. With a hollowed out stick she blew on the flame to just the right superlative, and then grabbed the hot chapati with bare fingers and handed it directly to one of usa. Information technology never failed to burn my sensitive hands. "No fire," she said one evening, "bad chapati."

Our room was in a side house, fastened to the barn, dissever from the main living quarters. Information technology was square, with a large bed in 1 corner. The walls at i bespeak were blue, but were now faded to a slightly-teal white. A flock of swallows had evidently occupied the room before we did. At that place were three mud nests within the room, and the wall and floor beneath each was littered with stains of their excrement. Equally the iii of usa piled into the bed each night nosotros could hear the cows sleeping soundly through our shared wall.

When I woke upward on that fateful morning time, I was feeling a little off-kilter. I was halfway through my time in Republic of india, and I was starting to reflect on the experiences I'd already had, and what value I found in them. I was too starting to miss the comforts of dwelling. Equally rewarding every bit information technology had been to challenge myself, I was getting a little tired with eating only potatoes and chapati.

Apparently, then was my digestion system. I got out of bed, stretched, and thought: "I should probably go to the bath." I got some toilet paper together, changed out of my pajamas and thought, "Oh goodness. I should really go to the bathroom." Quickly, I made my way out of the room and down to the outhouse.

The bathroom was in a pocket-sized tin shed down the loma and around the corner. The shed was curt – my head could bear upon the ceiling – and made of cement. The door to the bathroom was a piece of can, with holes in it merely large enough to make you pretty certain others could see inside, and held airtight by a short length of string clasped to a rusty nail in the wall. The toilet itself was a ceramic hole in the ground, that required a person squat to utilise information technology.

As I ran down the hill, I knew I was in trouble. One of the girls I was living with had already left the room to use the bathroom, and there was going to exist a line. I swatted by dancing collywobbles and hopping frogs to the bathroom stall and banged on the door.

"Jen! Let me in!" I yelled.

"I just got in hither!" she replied.

"FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING, JEN, PLEASE DEAR LORD Hurry," I begged.

She could sense the agony in my tone, and apace finished her turn.

I ran into the stall, squatted as fast as humanly possible, and ripped downwards my pants. But it was too late. The poop had already started, and it was non stopping someday shortly.

In that location I squatted, uncontrollable bowel functions on one stop and a large spider inching closer and closer on the other, and I wondered at what bespeak this had become my life. At what betoken did it become me who was off having adventures and diarrhea, and not someone else? Really, anybody else?

I went to India because I felt like information technology was something I wouldn't force myself to practise otherwise. The program was perfect. Two months long, a relatively tourist-free surface area, a homestay component – I knew I would never be able to experience something similar that if I tried to plan information technology myself. I probably knew, deep down somewhere, that I would never go someplace that challenged my way of living if I tried to programme information technology myself. Merely this wasn't by myself, and this wasn't my responsibility to programme. "Two months," I idea to myself. "I tin can make information technology through ii months of Republic of india, even if I detest it."

At that moment I wasn't so certain. I knew I had a lot more meals of potatoes and chapati coming my fashion, and I didn't desire to experience another episode of emergency poop. In fact, I didn't even know how to solve the i at paw. My pants were a mess, not cleanable with the meager corporeality of toilet paper I grabbed in apprehension. I needed to walk back upward the hill to my room and to the potential of cleaner clothes. My dad one time told me, "sometimes to motion frontward, you have to get backwards." I had to go backwards. I had no choice. I pulled my poopy pants dorsum upward, and stepped out of the stall.

The air felt different. Worse. Or perhaps that was simply my smell. I trudged up the hill and got to the room. "Out." I told my roommates. "I need the room."

Luckily, I had a stash of moisture wipes and was able to become cleaned up pretty well. Unluckily, I had no admission to garbage disposal. There is no real garbage infrastructure in that surface area of rural India, and in that location was no way I was going to exit that detail garbage for my host family to dispose of themselves. That meant I got to pack everything in my haversack. All of the toilet newspaper and wipes, and yes, fifty-fifty the poopy pants, made it into my pocketbook. That forenoon nosotros were leaving our homestay for the weekend to stay in a nearby resort. As I re-packed my pocketbook, I came to the slow realization that at present I would need to carry all of my belongings, which at present smelled highly questionable, the four miles to the resort.

Information technology was a long trek. The flies, e'er nowadays, were positively ceaseless. I walked with a sad, deadening stride. I felt deplorable for myself. Here I was, in rural India, with no real access to a washing auto or shower, with a poopy pants problem. A poopy pants problem in the United States would be fine. I could purchase new pants, and no one would always know if I threw the former ones away. Only in a small-scale village in India, I couldn't purchase new pants. In a pocket-sized village in India, someone would demand to destroy my pants personally (and would know who they belonged to).

Smelly, sweaty, and deplorable I arrived at the resort. I went to my cabin and faced the hard facts: I pooped my pants. Someone has to clean up my poopy pants. That someone is me. I have to clean up my poopy pants. We had one saucepan in the motel, and we used information technology for both laundry and showers. I turned the h2o on as hot as I could and washed the pants. I rinsed them out and washed them again, and once again, and once more. Then I washed out the saucepan and took a shower of my ain.

Later showering I smelled a little cleaner, and I began to put things in perspective. If I went to Republic of india and the worst thing that happened was a petty digestional dysfunction, that'due south pretty dandy. If I went to Bharat and the worst thing that happened was digestional dysfunction a few more times, that'southward notwithstanding pretty slap-up. Pooping your pants is not the worst affair in the world.

An hour or two after, my roommate came back to our motel. She immediately started complaining well-nigh the amount of homework she had to complete that weekend and how there would be no fourth dimension to do it.

I looked her expressionless in the center, smiled, and said, "Hey. You lot know what? This morning I literally pooped my pants."

"Yeah," she said. "Your life is worse."

Grievances aired, we moved on with our day.

Erin is a senior studying Comparative History of Ideas and Communication. She loves to tell stories and never takes herself also seriously.

jeterperney.blogspot.com

Source: https://depts.washington.edu/chidint/journal/2015/03/shorty-story-pooping-my-pants/

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