Toilets. Tissues. Tabos.

Filipinos are the Mandalorians of bottom-washing: It is the way.

I’m currently walking my teenage daughter through a book on Roman history. She’s fascinated by their ancient engineering projects and her eyes dance at cheerful illustrations of aqueducts, roads, and the Colosseum. We get talking about public baths and Roman hygiene in general. I explain, for example, that if you were in the city and had to do No. 2, you would enter a Roman toilet, sit on a stone slab with holes in it, and poop. No cubicles. No doors with locks. Just a wide-open sit down with other constipated citizens of the empire.

She looks amused and slightly repulsed. Of course - who would want to share a bath or sit in a toilet with people you don’t know? It’s a nightmarish thought.

The book’s content and illustrations are kid appropriate. No need for graphic drawings or getting into other inventions like the Xylospongium, which sounds like a Coldplay record and just as middling. What’s a Xylospongium, you ask? It’s a sponge on the end of a stick that Romans used to clean their backsides after doing No.2 in a public loo.

That’s right – a shared wiper.

This was peak civilization at one point. Today we look back, bemused and horrified. Modern plumbing is much more sanitary, thank heavens. Romans defecated into a river below their communal latrine, which ferried their feces to the sea. Today we have porcelain thrones and smooth seats, flushing, underground sewers, waste management systems.

And bidets. Glorious bidets.

I was introduced to the concept of bottom-washing at an early age. Not as sagely advice from parents who knew better, but when I noticed a crude, handwritten sign taped to the wall of the communal toilet in my high school boarding house:

“DO NOT USE TISSUE IN THIS TOILET!”

As a kid who grew up in the west, newly transplanted in the Philippines, this made no sense to me. Do not use toilet tissue? How in the world…?

Toilet tissue was all I knew. I was unaware of alternative methods.

Actually, that’s not true. Once when I was a kid, I saw a porcelain bidet in a home improvement center. My dad laughed and said that’s what posh people use to clean their cheeks. He was merely echoing the party line of most middle-class, first-world people. For them, the moment you install a bidet in your bathroom, you become all hoity-toity, like French royalty. Might as well start wearing tights and a cravat while you’re at it.

Needless to say, moving to the Philippines meant exchanging old habits for new ones. Gone were the days of tomato soup, Danger Mouse, and hot bubble baths; it was time for batchoy, MacGyver, and learning how to wash with a tabo.

For the uninitiated, a tabo is a hand-held dipper you use to scoop water out of a bucket to pour over your backside as you wash. It’s also used to pour water over your body when bathing, and for other general cleaning needs.

It’s said that Filipinos who move abroad will pay to have someone from the motherland send a plastic tabo for them to use. That’s how crucial this product is.

For me, learning to use a tabo in the toilet was a slow process. What can I say, old habits die hard. Using tissue is a worldwide practice dating back to 6th century China. Its history is long and storied. Consider this snippet by Barry Kudrowitz, associate professor and director of product design at the University of Minnesota:

In the Colonial America, the common means was corncobs until the 1700s when newspapers became available… Following newspapers, the Sears catalog and the Farmers almanac were the most popular form of toilet paper. The Farmer's Almanac even had a hole in it so it could be hung near the toilet. The use of the Sears catalog declined in the 1930's when Sears began printing on glossy, clay-coated paper (making it less absorbent). Many people complained.

So for people used to tissue as a matter of cultural upbringing, you can imagine how hard it is to jump to soap and water.

But it’s a jump I eventually made. And now I can’t imagine doing things the old way. I’m hoity-toity royalty now.

Case in point: I was somewhat baffled why, during my recent stay at a well-known hotel, there was not a single bidet in sight.

If that’s not the biggest blunder in Philippine hotel accommodations, what is? In this country, 99% of people wash their bottoms (I made that statistic up, but I’m pretty sure it’s true). Why deprive your target demo of the very thing they hold dear?

Maybe the hotel is a western brand and bidets are not part of the equation. Maybe bidets in every toilet makes water consumption skyrocket?

I can see investors deliberating in a board room, calculators strewn on a long table: “Bidets will bankrupt us. Our clients are mostly Filipino, they’ll figure something out.”

Indeed, if there is no tabo in the toilet, Filipinos won’t take that lying down (or sitting down, as the case may be). They’ll make one from scratch if they have to. I’m old enough to remember being at my lola’s house, using tabos made of repurposed motor oil containers from Shell. Cut in half, the bottom end floating in a bucket of cold well water. Smart and inexpensive.

The good news is, if you’re planning to travel and are unsure of the toilet situation, you can always get a portable bidet. My wife bought one a few years ago. It looks like a drinking container with an extendable spout. You fill it with water and then, when it’s time to wash, turn it upside down and the water sprinkles out like a dainty fountain. Problem solved.

The point of all this? I don’t know. If you’re a tissue-user, I get it. If you’re a tabo-user, good for you. If you’re thinking of building a hotel in the Philippines, increase your plumbing budget.

And if you’re a Filipino in a foreign land where tabos are not a thing, call lola, get the sturdiest plastic dipper on the market, and thank your stars you aren’t living in ancient Rome.