I was in Juba, South Sudan. Juba can be called Africa’s equivalent of a wild-west town. It’s pretty rough. People come there hoping for a better life, but with that comes a lot of crime and violence. Very few of the roads are paved, and no grass grows in the dry dirt, especially in February, when there’s no rain and the temperature hovers around 42 degrees celsius during the day. There’s no electricity, no central water, and no sanitation. The last part of that is the start of my story.

If you’ve ever been to Africa, you’re familiar with the squatty-potty. Essentially you have an elongated hole in the floor that drops to a pit; hopefully a deep one. Since there is no running water, after you do your business, you walk outside and fill a bucket with water that comes from a water tank that gets filled periodically with water trucked in from the Nile. It’s no good for drinking, but it’ll do for flushing.

One night we were staying in the compound in Juba. It was the middle of the night, so the generator had already been shut off, and the only light came from a headlamp, if you had one. A friend of mine got up to use the bathroom. As he entered the stall for the squatty, his headlamp landed on a pile of unmentionable on the floor of the bathroom. He was a bit annoyed that someone would have the lack of decency necessary to miss the hole completely and leave it there for the next person. What you have to realize is that this friend is in his sixties, with eyes in their sixties to go along.  As he went to kick the unmentionable into the hole with his shoe, the turd hopped toward him.  I heard a yell, and immediately suspected what actually happened. One of the large frogs that like to use the bathroom to stay out of the blazing heat had made its acquaintance with my friend.

For other antics of South Sudan’s frogs, check the blog post, https://southsudantraveler.wordpress.com/2013/11/27/check-your-shoes/