To Pee or Not to Pee! (for many that is the question)

I’ll admit that after reading about the women of India’s plight, I couldn't get the modified version of the Beastie Boys’ song out of my head…We gotta fight, for the right, to POTTY! The problem facing women in India, included in the 2.6 billion others in the same situation, is a lack of toilets. That’s it, 2.6 billion people on our planet don’t have a pot to…well you can finish that thought. Public urination for men isn't a big deal in India, apparently the men just face a wall, tree, or shrub and let go with the flow. For women needing to find a place to go is more complicated. So women have to hold it and may only find relief twice a day. As a former educator, I considered myself an expert at holding it but in some places (in India especially) the schools have no facilities at all and to add insult to injury, the public toilets for women are pay toilets. According to the men running these facilities, the women use more water since the men’s urinals don’t flush and the women’s potties do. So therefore women have to pay and more often than not the toilets are not sanitary and the women are forced to face rats, filth, and sometimes rapists. The last pay toilet I came across was at Harrod’s in London (cost in 1999-one pound) and it was nothing like the toilets in Mumbai, where there are 3,536 public restrooms that women share with men, and not one women’s-only facility. In a typical Mumbai slum, there might be six bathrooms for 8,000 women. Sometimes those bathrooms have collapsed, have dogs or rats living in them, or simply have no water. Next time I find myself digging through my purse for a tissue because I've inadvertently entered a stall with no TP, I am going to reconsider even considering a complaint.