By Vanette Colmenares
If you are Filipino, stocking on toilet paper is the least on your mind. Water always made us feel cleaner and more hygienic.
New York – Recently, when projections of a second wave of covid19 surge grabbed the headlines, people again slowly started to hoard toilet paper. What’s with toilet paper?
If you are Filipino, stocking on toilet paper is the least on your mind. For six months, we survived with 24 rolls of toilet paper and we are cleaner than ever ‘down there’. That’s because if you really are Filipino, you use water and soap which leaves your bottoms not only clean but truly ‘perfumed clean.’
When I was growing up, Filipino toilets always had a dipper and pail (tabo or kabo ug balde) filled with water beside the toilet bowl when doing their business because they would wash up (with soap too) and toilet papers were only used for drying up which really didn’t take much.
Water always made us feel cleaner and more hygienic. There were no wipes then, which eventually was not even helpful as they clogged pipes.
Later on, people just got rid of the pails and instead installed handheld hoses and hung them by the water closets. My children grew up this way and we had brought the tradition with us when we relocated in America.
A few years ago, almost every household that I went to visit in the Philippines had some form of handheld bidet. But because of the inconsistency of the water supply in the Philippines, you either had a surge of water gushing into your butt that could truly be freakily painful, or you’d feel exasperated and dissatisfied if water spurted like a baby’s pee.
For Filipinos, the refreshing feeling of water during butt time is heavenly.
Handheld bidets are now affordable and can easily be found in hardware stores like Home Depot. And it’s easy to assemble (or have someone like Mr.Handy NYC LLC install it for you – wink).
Technology has made progress with toilet seats as well. Those who can afford an extra $500 or more can have a heated toilet seat with an automatic tempered bidet, sometimes it even plays music and adds colored light to the bowl.
I have evolved from a handheld bidet to a manually controlled version wherein you can have the water spurt in the direction to the front or another click to the direction to the rear.
This is why Filipinos are never into toilet paper panic buying. This is no toilet humor.#
