The Parts of Home We Learn to Hide
At summer camp in Canada, I carried a water jug into the bathroom and tried to keep it unnoticed. One boy’s question changed how I left the toilet seat, but not the habit I had brought from home.
I did not stop doing the thing that made sense to me. I learned how to make it invisible.
I started going to summer camp in Canada when I was eleven. During the school year, I lived in Saudi. In the summer, I was with Canadian boys who seemed to understand rules I did not know were rules yet. Some differences were obvious. This one lived in the bathroom.
In our house, cleaning yourself with water after using the toilet was normal. In Saudi, there was usually a shattaf, the little hose beside the toilet. If there was no shattaf, you used a jug. It was just hygiene. At home in Canada, we used a jug too.
At camp there was toilet paper, no little hose and no familiar setup. So I used a jug. The problem was carrying it.
I did not want another boy to see me walking into the bathroom with it and ask why. I would hide it or carry it with my toiletries, trying to make it look as if it belonged with the shampoo and soap. I was a child smuggling an entire hygiene system into the bathroom and hoping nobody would ask about the cargo.
One day, I came out of the bathroom and left the toilet seat wet. Another boy noticed. He said something like, “Man, did you pee all over the seat?”
I tried to explain that it was water. I did not have the confidence to say the simple thing: I do not wipe, I wash. Instead, I was trying to explain the water without explaining myself.
The scene is funnier now. When I hear people talk about bidets, you would think they had discovered civilization in a bathroom aisle. At the time, I was a Saudi kid at a Canadian camp, worried that a jug had made me strange.
After that, I kept using it. I just wiped the seat when I was done.
Looking back, hiding the jug feels like a small form of assimilation. I had kept the practice from home, but learned to remove the evidence.
I do not think the boy meant to teach me anything about belonging. He thought I had peed on the seat. That is a reasonable thing to ask someone about, and leaving a shared seat dry can just be courtesy. I was already hiding the jug before he asked. I was a kid who wanted to avoid being the weird one carrying it.
Home came into the bathroom with me. I just learned not to let anyone see where it had been.