Day 6...Oh toilet where art thou?

Yes....yes you see this correctly - it is a toilet and it is a fine toilet at that (thanks to the lovely bottoms of my roommates who rest upon it). This is a toilet and this toilet (and all the working plumbing systems alike in the world) is what I am grateful for. This is yesterday's gratefulness object (though I am grateful for it every day) - but why, you may ask, am I grateful for a poop bucket, crapper, the John, the loo, swimming pool, pot, or whatever you may have named it?! Well  yesterday I was talking to my dear friend Derrick who went on a missions trip to Rwanda this past summer. As all missions trip conversations tend to do, our talking bird walked into poop stories and further extreme poop stories. Last summer I went to the Congo and was blessed with a toilet like you see here, except the plumbing sucked and we had to manually "flush" the toilet by fetching water buckets and forcefully pour the water down so it gets sucked up in the pipes - an ordeal (and a noisy one at that after a 2AM bout of sickness). When we went to the churches in Congo we were not as blessed to have such porcelain delicacies; rather, the bathroom was a hole in the ground with two bricks on either side of it where you placed your feet to balance - if you were lucky, you had three 5 foot tall brick walls surrounding you with a piece of cloth on the fourth in front of you (that always managed to be blowing in the wind, rendering it absolutely worthless......oh and peeping Tom children - oh my). Such a set-up was like the one Derrick had at the orphanage/churches in Rwanda. And these outhouses were merciless when it came to "runny belly" (as we call it in Jamaica). But as they say, "you gotta go, you gotta go" so you just do what you can with what you're given. These rural toilets made for some pretty crazy poop stories (my favorite kind of story) and some unfortunate events (one missions trip to Mexico a buddy had horrible horrible HORRIBLE runny belly that caused him to miss the target ((ps how do you do that?)) in the port-o-potty in the middle of the night...we found this particular port-o-potty to be locked shut with "caution" tape wrapped all around it the next morning on the way to breakfast - oops!....way-to-go pal hahaha). This is all to say that I am extremely grateful for our westernized plumbing/septic system that allows us to do our business in both style (have you seen all the types of toilet seat covers?!) and comfort. So thank you Mr. Toilet man who invented this fine piece of furniture - my hat goes off to you on this day.