Diarrhea of a Wimpy Kid

As a displaced British kid in a Filipino elementary school, I did everything to stay home.

Not my school, but could have been.

Ever been stuck in a toilet with “LBM”?

Let me back up a little. 34 years to be exact.

I was in my last year of UK junior school. A walk in the park, really. Class started at 8:30 and ended at 3:30. You’d read a little, write a little, do some maths, make some art, have a hot dinner (unless you were a cool kid who brought sandwiches to school in a He-Man or Star Wars lunch box), then play football for the rest of the break. The day would end with the teacher reading us a classic book, like The Hobbit or the Big Friendly Giant.

Warm, fuzzy, safe.

Then we hopped on a plane and moved to the Philippines. I was enrolled in grade six, in the deep south of Western Visayas. Pure third world province, pure rural banwa.

My first day at school I had to wake up at 5:30 to take a bath in water pumped directly from a deep well. I say “take a bath” but really it was scooping cold water out of a bucket, dousing it over my body, washing with soap, and then shivering on the wet concrete floor wondering what on earth just happened.

School started at 7am. Monday morning was flag ceremony, where students formed lines, faced the flagpole, put their hands on their chests and sang Lupang Hinirang, the Philippine national anthem. I understood not a single word. I glanced around and realized I was the only kid wearing a tucked in collared shirt, trousers, and shoes. Everyone else was in shorts and sandals.

They looked like they were on holiday; I looked positively corporate.

Then, the classes. Hour-long chalk and blackboard sessions with quizzes at the end, superintended by a teacher who rrrrolled her R’s and used English words I’d never heard in my life. We sat in vintage wooden chairs with built-in desks, where I lay my arm and doodled on intermediate pad paper. My desk had juvenile carvings and bash grooves, all caked in the invisible sweat of a thousand prior students, the natural wear and tear of ancient school furniture.

We sat through mathematics (hard), Filipino (harder), and home economics (where I once had to kill a chicken, drain its blood, and dump its lifeless carcass into a pot of boiling water).

That’s not all. Each kid in my section was assigned a patch of land to “cultivate”. A barren plot of soil that we had to transform into a mini garden by the end of the school year.

My classmates assured me it would be easy and fun. Of course they would. They tilled soil for breakfast. Literally.

Me, I had just flown in from a country where flowers came from Interflora.

So yeah, I had to create my own garden, from scratch.

One of the first things I did was thrust a twig into the dirt, hoping it would sprout leaves. We then proceeded to the school well where my classmates took turns pumping water and adeptly washing soil off their feet using… their feet. This was a daily ritual.

In six months, my patch went from looking like an unmarked grave to looking like an unmarked grave. All around it, in stark contrast, were the leafy, blossoming gardens of my classmates, overflowing with red Sampaguitas and vivid Bougainvillea.

My teacher would later remark that I wasn’t very “industrious”. Which surprised me, not because I was called out for being lazy but because “industrious” was another English word I’d never heard before.

Anyway, the bottom line is this: I detested school. It was hard. I didn’t understand what people were saying. I looked out of place. I didn’t like getting up early in the morning. And I couldn’t care less about growing flowers.

So, I found ways to skip school.

One was to simply not go. This only worked if my parents were out for the day. I’d come home for lunch, find the house empty, and conveniently forget to go back to class.

Another was to pretend to be sick. And by pretend, I mean I had to act sick.

Headaches were hard to fake because, as a kid, headaches weren’t really a thing, you know? Migraines were a very adult ailment. In short, they were hard to sell.

Instead, my chosen technique was to say I had LBM.

Now, I’d never heard of LBM before coming to the Philippines. Someone explained it to me: “Loose Bowel Movement”. AKA diarrhea. A weird acronym, but commonly used by Filipinos to describe what happens after eating oysters left out for too long.

Pleading LBM was an easy way out. And there were a million plausible reasons to have it. Dirty water, food poisoning, dwarves in the trees – LBM had many causes. But it came with a price. Like I said, you couldn’t just “say” you had it. You had to feign it.

Now normally, this meant clutching your abdomen, wincing, and going, “I’ve got a stomachache” or “I’ve got diarrhea”. You needed to moan with conviction - but not too much. Oversell it, and you might be hauled to a nearby clinic, for a checkup. Like the time I faked having a sore side. I was brought to hospital and made to have a blood test where the nurse pricked my finger with a large razor blade and caught all my blood with glass plates. Most unpleasant.

Anyway, one day I decided to go next level. To not just say and look like I had LBM, but to lock myself in the toilet and make diarrhea noises, to really sell the subterfuge. I could so this, I reasoned to myself, because the toilet was right next to the dining room and had no ceiling…

A quick word about this. When we moved to the Philippines, we spent the first few months living in a relative’s house while our dream home was being built down the road. Our temporary house had one toilet without a ceiling. The walls went up, but the top was left open so when you looked up, you could see straight into the rafters. For airflow, I suppose?

This was common for many concrete homes in the province. No ceilings. Plenty of overheard conversations.

So, this was my masterplan one fine afternoon: to wait until my dad was sitting at the dinner table during lunch, hop into the adjacent toilet without a ceiling, and make the best fart noises I could by blowing on my arm (a technique favored by kids and man-kids around the world).

I must have done this for at least 10 minutes. Sitting on the toilet, my legs getting numb, my lips pursed against my forearm, blowing compressed air against my skin, generating exquisite fake flatulence. The sounds were loud and echoed merrily up the toilet walls.

At last I finished, satisfied with my performance. It certainly sounded like I had LBM. I pulled my trousers up, flushed, and emerged looking like I needed a nap.

My dad stared at me and said, “Does your mouth hurt?”

The game was up.

But of course. My dad is the grand master of flatulence. The kind of person who not only enjoys expelling wind, but is forever amused with fart jokes, always laughing at anything remotely sounding like bad gas. The kind of guy who could smell a fake fart a mile away. Or in this case, not smell it.

The blood drained from my face.

Oddly enough, he let me stay home that afternoon. I think he deemed my toilet tomfoolery so utterly ludicrous, I deserved to be rewarded. So, I spent the rest of the day playing, happy to be away from school, more alive than anything in my dead plot of land.