A Tale of Two Toilets (part II)

Continued from yesterday, the tale of getting two toilets repaired in Mali in 1999. 

Day three - 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?.....

I wasn’t too sure about super gluing my toilet together, but decided I’d go get some. I took advantage of the time in town to get some vegetables, since I had invited my teammates who were in town for the day, to supper at my house. Kind of inconvenient, but I hadn’t seen them in a while and they would only be around until the next morning. Unfortunately, I hadn’t bought any meat, which you have to do early in the morning at the market, while it’s still fresh. At this point, I figured I’d deal with that later, perhaps buying something at the evening market.

The superglue did do the trick. Unfortunately, even with the toilet entirely off, they were unable to unblock the toilet. Not having a proper “snake” to stick down the pipe, they tried all sorts of things including wire and a garden hose. Finally at four, I told them to stop for the day. My bathroom looked like a real disaster area and I needed to get to work on supper. That and I had a rather daring idea involving…. battery acid.

Here, I must stop my story to say that folks working in the developing world often end up in situations where they fell a bit like MacGyver, the TV character who always had to get out of scrapes using odds and ends, his own ingenuity and his Swiss Army knife. This was such a time. I had a flash of inspiration (insanity?). The rag that I had accidentally flushed down the toilet had been a shirt just a few weeks before, until the day I spilled battery acid on it. The acid ate right through the cloth, so I made it into a rag. Couldn’t the acid do the same thing now?

I went back into town and bought two bottles of battery acid and went to see if there was any fresh meat in the afternoon market. It was too early for that, so I went off to one of our two restaurants, which sells Chinese egg rolls. I had in mind to buy enough of these to feed us all and reheat them at home. Unfortunately, it was 4:30 and they hadn’t made them yet. Could I come back at 6:30? Well, that’s when my guests were arriving. How about 6:00?

Back home, I donned surgical gloves and attempted to open the bottle of battery acid. This is one of the few products made in Mali, which means that the plastic bottle is practically impossible to open without cutting through the plastic lid with a knife. Not impossible with the local vinegar or bleach bottles, but a bit more tricky when you’re dealing with battery acid. I managed, however, and poured the contents into the pipe. The water started bubbling immediately. Within an hour, the water level had dropped considerably, but had not unblocked.

It was 5:00 and I desperately needed a shower, but that was impossible because of the rubble in the bathroom. Fortunately, I have a bathtub in the other bathroom. I was undressed and about to step into the water when the doorbell rang. I yelled something out, pulled my clothes on and went to answer it. It was my landlord, who lives in the capital city, 12 hours away by train, and only visits once or twice a year! Eeek! I invited him and his companion in because they wanted to see the place. Fortunately, they didn’t want to see the bathroom, where my toilet lay dying. They talked about this and that - painting the exterior of the house. Oh, and could I give them the rent then? This meant writing out a receipt and subtracting off the plumbing costs for Fantasy #2 (which was not my fault).

Around 5:30 they left, and I headed back to the waiting bathtub. Once again the doorbell rang. This time it was the pastor. He had come to see about why I had gotten Mr. Sissoko to the work when we had contacted Mr. Sacko personally. It was only at this point that I realized that the plumber who’d been in my house was not the one we had contacted together. Mr. Sacko had come by later in the day. He seemed familiar at the time, and also seemed to know Mr. Sissoko. When he saw that Mr. Sissoko was doing okay, he left. I couldn’t quite figure it out at the time. Seems the pastor felt bad, reasonably so, that we had contacted this guy and then let another man do the job. We decided that I should give some money to pay for his gas money for coming out.

Well, I finally got my bath and even made it to the restaurant to get our egg rolls before my teammates  arrived at 6:30. We had a good time, in spite of everything. They had just driven up from the capital and had mail for me and some grocery items you can’t get locally, including some baking soda.

"Use the baking soda, Tim."

After they left, I had another “MacGyver moment”  while putting away the baking soda. Something from way back in chemistry class popped up in my brain. Baking soda is a base and reacts with acid to produce lots of gas. What if I poured the acid down the pipe, let it go down some, and then poured a solution of baking soda and water down after it?

I proceeded to pour half the remaining bottle of acid down the pipe,  The water level was much lower, so it went down past the L at the bottom of the hole in my bathroom. Then I mixed a ¼ cup of baking soda into a gallon of water and poured it down the hole. It reacted immediately. Lots of fizzing. I had to hold the plunger tightly over the pipe to keep it all from exploding out. If I had had a way of sealing off that end of the pipe, I think the resulting pressure would have blown out the blockage, but alas I did not, so sometime later that night, I pour the last half bottle down the drain, which still seemed to be blocked.

I awoke on Thursday, Day 4, to find the pipe still blocked. Mr. Sissoko came back and I promptly asked him how he had come to be at my house at just the right time the day before. I might have considered him an “Angel Unaware” except that I would have expected better plumbing from an angel. Seems there was a reasonable explanation. We had initially asked the pastor’s neighbor if he knew any good plumbers. Without our knowledge, he had contacted Mr. Sissoko and told him that there was a Toubab in desperate need of a plumber.

While I had been conversing with Mr. Sissoko, Emmanuel, my house worker, had started working on the pipe again with the long wire snake. Mr. Sissoko was convinced that the only thing to do was to dig down ANOTHER TWO FEET into the floor until we got to the L in the pipe. I was very reticent to do that.  Fortunately, at that moment, Emmanuel managed to wiggle the wire just right and the pipe was unblocked. I’m sure the acid had done its job and just needed a little help. That and some solid prayer.

I was fairly relieved that the toilet was unplugged. All that remained was to remount the toilet. This took all day. I had enough cement on hand, but had to go buy some plaster. Then I had to take Mr. Sissoko back to his friend’s house to get a big wrench. When they got the toilet back upright and cemented in place, it was a bit lower than it had been before, which meant that the pipes didn’t fit right anymore. One pipe had to be bent and another one cut and re-thread by the local welder. Eventually everything was back together. I paid Mr. Sissoko. The pipes were leaking some, but he assured me it would stop soon. This is a fairly common refrain, and oddly enough, they usually do stop in a few hours.

Not this time though. There was a steady trickle of water running across the bathroom floor and down the shower drain. I was worried that the cement and plaster wouldn’t dry properly, so I cut the water off at the street that evening. Friday, when I turned it on, it promptly begin leaking again. I was exhausted and couldn’t face another day of plumbing, so I decided to live with it until Monday.

Monday arrived. One week from the original incident. I made the decision to contact Mr. Sacko this time. It would help to mend fences with him. That and I didn’t want Mr. Sissoko back near my plumbing any time soon.  Mr. Sacko did a fine job, but we did have to go into town in my car to get some parts. This time, the pipes DID stop leaking after he left.

Thus ends the Tale of Two Toilets . . . almost. Fantasy #1 is unblocked, but doesn’t seem to handle toilet paper well, so I’m primarily using Fantasy #2. Two weeks after it was fixed, I noticed that it was running quite a bit. I climbed up on my chair to look inside the tank. These sorts of things normally just require adjusting the float valve slightly. Well as soon as I touched the float valve, water began squirting out of the pipe. The plastic nut had cracked. I was leaving town the next day, so I just turned off the stop valve, which worked for once. Upon my return, I had to go get Mr. Sacko, who did a fine job. This time, it only took two trips to the hardware store, and I discovered a different make of float valve. Perhaps this kind will hold up better. . . .

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”.