scratchy

Two days ago, we ran out of toilet paper, and there is no toilet paper for sale in this town. (There is no toilet paper for sale in this town because most people don’t use toilets. They use the great outdoors. In the great outdoors, there are readily available leaves and grasses. No need to pollute the environment with paper.) The nearest reservoir of toilet paper is Bigger Town Three Hours Away, which was not an option at the moment when the toilet paper ran out, because it was 6 p.m. and because the car was needed for other things the next day (yesterday). In the absence of toilet paper, we resorted to the next best thing: old newspapers shipped in from Nairobi. We are currently using the news of August. Circa August 15, actually. It’s not exactly soft huggable Charmin Ultra.

This whole thing reminds me of this one time in high school when our friend D. and her family went to the Henry Ford Museum somewhere in the eastern part of Michigan. When she came back, she announced, as we were sitting around on the floor in front of our lockers of a morning, “The only thing I learned is that people used to wipe their butts with corn cobs.”