Sanitation matters..

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Now for the unglamorous aspects of our Bedok kampong house living - the sanitation. We did not enjoy modern sanitation but used the bucket system. Each trip to the toilet was necessarily short (no reading nor staring at your phone if it existed then!) When we entered we had to climb up a step and squat with the 'dong' (soil container) below us. Options to use toilet paper or water was there. The night soil man would come every day (via the back garden) to clear. Sometimes he pulls out the 'dong' through the flapdoor below while one of us is still inside! Water and the sapu lidi was used to clean up the 'dong' before inserting back through the toilet flapdoor (yes we witnessed this cleaning). You can imagine when we moved to our HDB flat in 1974 this was one of the inconveniences we were relieved (pardon the pun) of


Left photo credit to blogger Yeo Hong Eng, right photo taken 1969)

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