Outhouse Fun

This is a outside a house that I rented in Nicaragua for a little over two months. In the background you can see my outhouse. Trust me, you don't want to see it up close and personal. Today I was thinking about all the interesting situations with outhouses that I've lived through. In Central America they vary from being a hole in the ground, a little pipe sticking up in the ground, to a concrete whole that actually looks like a toilet and is much more comfortable. Well, when I first moved into this little house, I was amazed that the outhouse didn't smell. I found out at night that it was crawling with cockroaches. My boyfriend at the time (who's now my husband) said that we should try to get them out by spraying them with spray. My husband is from Nicaragua, but I don't think he had personally ever dealt with a cockroach problem. They either leave them alone or they don't have them. So he sprayed the outhouse. Well, about fifteen minutes later hundreds of cockroaches come running out and heading for our house. Our house filled with cockroaches in a record amount of time and my husband and I along with three of his little brothers were trying to kill them as quickly as possible. The neighbor's chickens came over and were eating the ones outside as they tried to crawl to safety. There were cockroaches EVERYWHERE. I didn't know so many could possibly live in such a small hole in the ground. I could not use the outhouse for several days because they kept coming up from the bottom and were constantly trying to make their way toward "safety". It was disgusting. I'm not sure if there's a right way to try to get cockroaches out, but this was disgusting and I don't plan on trying it again.

On New Years Eve, we were waiting for the festivities to begin in a small town in Nicaragua at this same house. I saw a skunk in the bushes and Moi (my husband, then my boyfriend) chased him away with his little brothers. About thirty minutes later I had to go to the bathroom. I was afraid because I told Moi that the skunk could be in there. He told me that it wasn't and so I went to the outhouse to do my business. Well, I opened the door and guess who was staring at me, none other than the skunk. We left to go to the bathroom at his sister's house, because I didn't want anyone to get sprayed by the skunk. We came back an hour later, and the skunk was still in the bathroom. For two weeks the skunk visited and lived in our outhouse almost every night. I seemed to be the one that always found him and the left running for the house. I was so scared the skunk was going to spray me! Anyway, I ended up always waking up someone in the middle of the night to have them check the outhouse for skunks for the next several weeks. We ended up living the outhouse door open at night since the skunk could get in anyway, so that it would be easier to check on without getting too close to the skunk. It was an adventure that I would rather not repeat.