Although Garcia Marquez would likely shoot me for bastardizing his book title, I wanted to adopt it to refer to a very old man with enormously dirty hands that I met in Yaounde. Granted that given all of the awkward situations that one can encounter in a men's room, this was fairly mild. Nonetheless, it stuck with me. Mary and I had to travel to Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon which is located in the far South, so that we could visit the Chad embassy to obtain visas for an upcoming teaching mission. The process of obtaining the visas is a post in-and-of itself. On the way back we were waiting at the bus station when, as is not at all uncommon, I had to use the restroom. For those who have not travelled in the developing world I will explain the variety of facilities that one may come across: at the top is the US standard which has a toilet at various levels of cleanliness, toilet paper, a sink, and running water. These are golden, and worth paying for. Next you have something akin to a closet with a toilet, no paper, several mops, rat poison, and buckets which you fill to then dump in the toilet to accomodate flushing. This bucket may-or-may not be fillable within the room, or you may need to find a faucet outside. Further down is the "squatty potty" which is a tile-lined hole with various surrounding inclines to encourage the excretia into a hole in the ground. There is never paper nor a sink. The tile can have any number of foreign objects in and around it. Still too fancy? Never fear, you also have the concrete squatty potty, no inclines, no lights, and frequented by people who apparently have some type of compressed CO2 charge resident in their colon that forces any products to be expelled in the general direction of the hole, but really anywhere in a 1.3m radius is acceptable. The hole often has script in Latin or Aramaic stating "Abandon all hope ye who enter here." Do keep in mind that relieving oneself in the woods or behind a shack is, ironically, a major step up from this last option.
At any rate, back to the old man. I examined a concrete room, immediately turned around unsatisfied, and found a tile version back at the bus stop. While in there pondering my own mortality, I noticed a 25 cfa coin on the ground (this has a approximate US value of 4 cents), and pittied it. When I left the room, a very well-dressed, exceptionally old man entered after me. As I sat on the bench bathing my hands with Purelle and debating whether or not to ignite the residual alcohol, the old man came back out holding the coin, and trying to give it to me thinking that I had dropped it. Of course here the wings refer to his hands, and "enormous" refers both to his heart, and to the enormously awful sanitary state accompanying his wings. I was simultaneously touched that he brought the coin out to me thinking that it was mine, and wanted nothing to do with touch, in the physical sense, for the obvious reasons. I did my best mix of French and pseudo-sign language to say "No, for the love of God, no, you keep it" which he did. I was of cource convicted that I come from a country and social standing where I can refuse money laying on a latrine floor because I would rather not get dirty, and reaffirmed my gratitude to God that I am so blessed. Part of me wanted to give the man a lot of money so that he didn't have to pick up toilet money--what really struck me, though, is that he didn't pick it up for him, he picked it up for me, a white foreigner whom he was trying to help. The incident certainly helped me to put my blessings in perspective, as well as to encourage sacrificial actions for others, no matter how small. That being said, if I thought that he had dropped the coin, I think I would have kicked it into the hole, and given him one of the "clean" ones from my pocket. PS: I then went home and soaked all of my coinage in bleach water.
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