A Tale of Two Toilets - Part I

This is a tale that originally happened  back in 1999 in the first Malian house I would call my own. This story has been a favorite of many, so here it is, slightly edited and in 2 parts.

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I have a Malian friend who is fond of saying, “Le Toubab a douze métiers”, which translates roughly as “The foreigner has 12 professions.” He is astounded at the way we fearlessly attack various pursuits around the house: painting, carpentry, wiring, car repair, bicycle repair and occasionally even our chosen profession - linguistics and language learning. To the Malian, these domains each belong to a specialist and others shouldn’t venture into such areas. I’m not convinced that Westerners are innately more gifted in these areas, but we are brought up to be do-it-yourselfers AND we have a heck of a lot more tools at our disposition than the average Malian.

For a while, I thought that plumbing might be one of my twelve professions, but I have since decided it is most certainly not. Furthermore, I’m convinced plumbing is the Devil’s handiwork, since only someone who has sold his soul to the Devil could make pipes fit together and not leak. How this EVER works is a mystery to me.

Here follows one of the darkest plumbing nightmares I have experienced. It was a Monday as I recall, and the day started simply enough. I did some language analysis and then had a language lesson, made some trips into town for some errands, and was back home by 3:00 and was sitting at my desk working away on language study, when nature called - rather urgently, I recall. I made use of my front bathroom.

A Turkish Toilet, also known as a "squatty potty"

Before I proceed much further, I must pause to note that I am fortunate to have not one, but two toilets in my house. My colleagues moved into a house that had two Turkish toilets, which are nice porcelain structures that flush, but are missing one crucial feature - a seat. You put your feet on two raised porcelain steps and squat down. When my friends moved into their house, they asked the landlord to fix several broken things and added that they would like to have a sit-down toilet. He replied that he would repair what was broken and paint the place, but that they would have to pay for any “fantasies”  (like toilets). Thus, I feel honored to have two fantasies in my house.

Well, on this particular Monday, the fantasy in the master bathroom backed up in a major way. I had been fearing this would happen, since the week before I had poured a bucket of dirty water down the toilet. Unfortunately, there was a rag hiding in the bottom of the bucket. I watched in horror as it went down the toilet, never to reappear. I had been holding my breath for that week, hoping against hope that the inevitable would not happen. Well, it did happen that fateful day. The toilet started overflowing and running across the floor to the shower drain which is not three feet away. More water came up from a hole in the floor next to the toilet. I managed to get the water to stop, but not to go down in the toilet.

I went in search of my plunger, but it was too small for the rather large hole in the bottom of the toilet bowl. I decided to make the first of seven trips to the quincaillerie, French term for what we call the hardware store and the Brits inexplicably call the “ironmonger’s”. I came back armed with two bigger plungers, one for the bathroom, and one to replace the little plunger, now soiled, which I use regularly on my kitchen sink. When I got home, I had the difficult task of explaining to the neighbor Malian women what these odd sticks were for. Not an easy concept, if you’ve not familiar with a western toilet. Once inside, I made the discovery that these larger plungers were still too small to cover the massive hole in the bottom of my toilet. Needless to say, the Tidy-Bowl Man should steer clear of my toilet unless he gets a bigger boat. My efforts at plunging ended up having little effect except for getting toilet water all over the place.

At this point, I decided that perhaps the water in the toilet bowl would go down on its own if I left it. In the meantime, I determined that I’d better go back and take a look at Fantasy # 2. I had just returned that month from a year in the US. Upon my return, I discovered that this particular toilet was leaking considerably, so I had turned the water off. Now, I figured it was grand time to get it working. Fantasy #2, while still a sit-down toilet, is one of the varieties that has a tank situated on the wall high above the toilet. The user pulls a chain to flush it, and the water descends through a long pipe to the toilet. The tank on this one is higher than normal and for some reason, the seat is extra low. To reach the tank, I had to stand on a chair, the seat of which fit easily over the lower half of the toilet.

Float valve (or "ballcock"if you are British and looking for one of these at the ironmonger's)

As soon as I opened the tank, I saw two immediate problems. First, the metal rod on the float arm had rusted through. This happens every four months without fail, forcing the homeowner to buy an entire new float system. For some inexplicable reason, they make this metal rod, which by its very nature gets wet frequently, out of a metal that rusts very easily. The quincailleries here only seem to have one brand, so we’re stuck with it.

When I started adjusting the metal rod, the part of the floater that screws into the water pipe, broke off. Off, I went to the quincaillerie to get a new float valve. This was my fourth trip into town for the day. The people at Quincaillerie Diallo, my least favorite of all the quincailleries here, but the most well stocked, greeted me when I entered as “Bill Clinton” (who was President at the time and since I was American this was a natural association).  Needless to say, this appellation did nothing to improve my already frustrating day.

I decided I’d try to paint the metal rod on the new float valve with anti-rust paint. This meant I had to put off any plumbing activities until the morning when the paint had dried. I did manage to plunge/splash enough in fantasy #1 to get all the dirty water out of it.

            The next morning I thought I would be able to install the new float valve before my lesson at 10 a.m. Silly me. I immediately found that one of the existing metal nuts was broken. Off to 2 different quincailleries to get the parts needed. Oddly enough, I found out that one of the nuts is called a mamelon in French, which translates literally as nipple. This confirmed several deep-seated notions about the French, until I was informed that the correct term for these nuts in English is also nipple.

            After buying the nipple and another odd-shaped nut, I went back home and faithfully had my language lesson. That afternoon I tried my hand once again at plumbing. After several mishaps, I finally got everything together, but it leaked considerably, in spite of the Teflon compound I had put on the threads to insure a tight fit. The more I tightened the more it leaked. Eventually, the plastic part of the floater pipe, broke off, leaving me exactly where I had been the night before, except that when I tried to close the shut-off valve, the handle broke off and there was no way to cut off the water. This meant cutting off the water outside the house and passing the night without running water. My 2 barrels of extra water made this less of a hassle than it could have been.

The Great Toilet Fiasco - Day three. 

I concluded that plumbing was not one of my 12 professions and having conceded this, went in search of a plumber. My previous experiences with Malian plumbers had not been positive ones. The normal method is to go down to the local water and electric company and grab one of the plumbers who hangs out there waiting for work. No use trying to call a plumber - they’re not listed in the book, and I don’t have a phone anyway. If you did manage to call one, he wouldn’t have a car and even if he did, you wouldn’t be able to tell him how to get to your house since the streets have no names and the houses aren’t numbered.

However, I have never gotten very good plumbers from the plumbers pool in front of “Energie du Mali.” So I went to ask the pastor of the church if he knew of anyone. He asked his neighbor who mentioned someone down the street. We decided not to go get him, but instead went to the train station to find someone the pastor knew. This man, Mr. Sacko agreed to come at around 9:30. This gave me time for a quick run to the hardware store to by another “nipple” and a new cut-off valve.

When I returned home, it was 9:30 and a man was standing on my porch with a wrench, the only tool any Malian plumber ever comes with. (Well, there is a story, apocryphal perhaps, of a plumber that came to a missionary’s house armed only with a piece of string). Anyway, since he was there at the right time, I assumed he was the plumber we had contacted. Only later did I find out that this man was NOT Mr. Sacko, but Mr. Sissoko who had been sent by the pastor’s neighbor. I went all day assuming he was the one I had asked to come. Anyway, I let him and he quickly went to work on Fantasy #2. I figured it was best to get it working before attacking the blocked one.

It was quickly brought to my attention that I need to buy MORE parts, so we went off together to buy them. Back to Quincailerie Diallo, where they were kind enough not to greet me as Bill Clinton. Armed with more parts,  Mr. Sissoko managed to fix Fantasy #2 in an hour or so, though his first attempt leaked as much as mine had the night before.

Sometime around lunch on Day 3, Mr. Sissoko went to work on Fantasy #1, the one in the master bathroom. It was quickly determined that it couldn’t be unblocked. It would have to be removed. This would involve chipping the toilet up out of the tile floor. Did I have a chisel? No. Could I take him to his friend’s house to get one? Sure. Off we went in my trusty red Suzuki jeep through a maze of dirt streets and mud brick homes to his friend’s house. He wasn’t there, but we eventually got the chisel.

Back to the scene of the disaster. For several hours, Mr. Sissoko chipped away at the base of the toilet, aided by my house worker, Emmanuel.  A pile of cement and tile fragments formed in my bathroom and eventually, the throne itself lay on its side, its base cracked in several places and a few small pieces actually broken off. Did I have any superglue?

Tune in tomorrow for part 2 of “A Tale of Two Toilets”.