In any case, she finally did give me something to loosen me up (I don't remember what, exactly), and I spent most of that night sitting on the toilet in excruciating pain, listening to Brahms's German Requiem on my Discman and squirting out first hard, and then molten and liquid shits. I kept wondering what my host family must think of the dumb American woman sitting on their toilet (they lived in a town and had running water) for hours on end, making these horrible noises. When I was done I was afraid to flush -- the toilet was completely full and brown, and once in the U.S. my parents had to replace all of their plumbing and tried to pin the blame on me and my big shits (although, they weren't the real cause of the pipe blowout -- there were tree roots growing into the pipes). It took several attempts for me to send the products of my bowels to the bowels of the Earth, but it did all finally go down and nobody in the host family ever said anything to me about it.
Later, while still living with the same family, I developed a habit of occasionally going out at night with my fellow trainees. The family with which I was staying did not approve of any activity that didn't involve the Pentecostal church and speaking in tongues, so they would lock me out if I wasn't home by 8:00 or so. I acquired a certain degree of skill at unlocking and opening my bedroom window from the outside and climbing in to go to sleep, then slipping out back in the morning and walking in through the back door in my pajamas. Nobody ever asked me anything about that, either.
The only problem was peeing or pooping. My bedroom was always locked from the outside, so I had no way to get to the hallway -- and thus to the bathroom -- if I needed to go. I am not proud of the solution I found; but on the other hand, the mother of the family used to use her two-year-old son's shirt to wipe up his pee and then put it back on him, so I guess it wasn't that bad in the grand scheme of things.
The houses in that town were very close together, so even though I could actually see the neighbors watching soccer just a few feet away, I would just stick my butt out the window and do it... Today, for the first time, I wonder why I didn't just go back out the window I had used to climb into the house in the first place and use a more sensible spot. Huh. It's funny what aging makes you realize.
The most interesting poop-related occurrence actually happened to a friend of mine. We we're stationed in rural areas about twenty miles from any tarred road, with families who didn't have running water. Thus, we used latrines. My friend had a cat, and one day when she went to the toilet she could hear the cat meowing. It turned out that the cat had fallen down into the latrine.
My friend tried everything to get that cat out. She tried leaning her body as far as she could down the hole, sticking a long log down for the cat to climb up, even dropping down a bucket full of meat on a rope to entice the cat. Nothing worked. Meanwhile, all weekend, every time she had to go to the toilet, she was forced to urinate and/or defecate right on to her cat while listening to its pitiful meows. She went so far as to ask her host father to shoot the cat, because she figured the cat was going to die and it should at least be put out of its misery. Her host father refused, saying that it was bad luck to kill a cat.
This sounds like a very sad story, but it has a happy ending. One morning my friend woke up and smelled this awful reek. Then she heard meowing. Somehow that cat, after four or five days of being stuck, had managed to get out. My friend had one hell of a time trying to wash off the poop smell, and never did figure out how that cat had escaped the latrine. However, her host family was afraid of the cat from then on -- since there was no way the cat could have escaped the latrine, they decided it must have been a ghost.