Toilet paper fire

Here in San Miguel, where perhaps two or three cars or trucks pass through per week, it is a common occurrence to see people burning their garbage. Unlike in Flores, no truck comes by to pick it up and take it to a dump. And since pretty much no where in Guatemala is the plumbing up to the challenge of sucking down toilet paper, every toilet has a wastebasket next to it for depositing the toilet paper. Even if you can get a kid to take your garbage off to the dump here, everyone would agree that toilet paper should just be burned. The first time someone suggested I burn my toilet paper I laughed at the image of myself out front tending a burning pile. I’d been able to avoid it to date because a few times my landlady’s mother was sweeping up leaves out front and asked me for my toilet paper, and a few times I used a piece of corrugated metal as a base for burning it within my little fenced-in compound, away from the eyes of the public, but I figured enough was enough. No one else is embarrassed to burn their paper in front of their house, I could already imagine my landlady asking me what happened to her piece of metal, and I had some guests coming over so I had to do something. I’d been thinking about it for days and days. The people who live across from me have a little store where they sell about ten things and they are constantly out front of their house. I honestly can’t imagine this is how they earn their living because they can’t be selling all that much of anything, but as far as I can tell both the husband and wife seem to be there pretty much constantly. This is nice because they kind of keep an eye on my place, get new 5 gallon water bottles for me when the truck passes by once a week, and whenever I pass by the husband calls me Laurita, which for some reason I love. It is bad, however, because if I want to do anything discreetly there’s not much chance until past 11 pm, at which point it seems that making a fire in front of my place in the middle of the night would enhance the oddball status I already enjoy as the only gringa in San Miguel. But, because of my impending visitors, I decided to just suck it up and do it yesterday morning, Saturday. I got excited as I was walking to the gate of my place to see that the family across the street were actually all leaving as a group, so I hung back a minute until they were gone. Then I went outside, made a pile of the bags of paper on a preexisting burn mark, and nervously went through about 7 matches before it caught fire. Then I realized I’d have to stir it around to make sure everything caught fire, so I found a stick and did just that. All this time, three or four people passed by and looked at me, I thought, oddly. I might have appeared strange, but most likely that’s because I’m seldom seen out front of my house, I’m usually coming or going to the boat and because my house is a little removed from the street I don’t pass a lot of time in public view so for some this might have been a rare gringa sighting. I remember when I’d been living here only a few weeks I took a walk around San Miguel and as I turned a corner I’d never turned before I heard a kid yell, “Here comes the gringa!” Anyway, yesterday I finally confronted something I’d been dreading and I’m glad about that, though it pained me later on to deposit more paper in the empty basket. Well, in about six days I’m going back to the Santa Barbara for a week and half, so at least there I won’t have this kind of concern. There I’ll just have the situation that passes every time I come back from here, of finding myself with toilet paper in my hand and looking around for a wastebasket before I realize that I can just drop it in the toilet.