Living Large

The capture of Radovan Karadzic was the subject of a morning email exchange with an old college friend of mine. We're both up on the various histories of former Soviet republics, as he is Latvian and well-traveled and I...well, I had sex in Tuzla once.

Anyway, I was telling my friend how beautiful it is there and how I wish I could go back to the areas in which I travelled--amazing rocky gorges and rolling green hills fading off into the distance, groves of plum trees and sheep grazing on rocky soil. The country air was amazing.

The city air? Smelled like burning garbage.

One of the most overlooked and underappreciated facets of life in advanced western cultures unaffected by war is one of the most basic...sanitation conditions. We put the garbage out. Someone comes to take it away. We drive past landfills on our way to the lake or to the country. They smell like natural gas. We have garbage disposals and dumpsters and, frankly, trashcans in our bathrooms.

Others are not so lucky.

When I was in Bosnia, there did not seem to be any sanitation system in place. There were no garbage trucks. There was no garbage day. Recycling anything but old furniture was unheard of. Unless you count taking over your neighbor's abandoned house. Roadsides were littered with all kinds of waste. Diapers. Toilet paper. Old hoses. Tires. Shoes. Everything.

The countryside was better, as there were less people. I stayed, the first time I was there, in a fairly small town that was less war-torn than most. But there were no garbage pails in the bathrooms. And sometimes there was no water in the bathrooms.

I did not plan well. I mean, I brought everything I would, or could, ever possibly need. I brought things I'd never need. But I didn't...well, plan well. As a woman. A woman in her child-bearing years.

Let's face it, I had my period somewhere with no running water and no garbage system.

This? Was not fun. It was not educational. It was not an adventure. It tested my creativity. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. But I was not a happy girl until we got back to the big city and some semblence of garbage removal, even if there was water only one hour a day.

I won't tell you how I managed.

I will tell you that, until you have squatted on a mountain path, uphill from a medival-style farm, having searched for land mines, with black tights down around your ankles, trying to figure out what to do with your tampon...well, until you've done that, you haven't really lived.