NOT everyone is lucky enough to have an in-home bathroom, and one formerly Amish woman shared how she dealt with it.
Naomi Swartzentruber, 43, described how many Amish used an outhouse to go to the restroom, and her family had an interesting alternative for toilet paper.
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Naomi Swartzentruber ran away from her strict Amish community in Michigan in 1997 when she was 17 years old.
Almost 30 years later, she recounted many humbling experiences from her adolescence with The U.S. Sun.
Swartzentruber previously shared how Amish garden fertilization tips and dishwashing hacks.
Now a resident of Arizona, she has indoor plumping and other modern amenities, but that wasn’t always the case.
Her family didn’t have indoor plumbing, which also meant they didn’t have a toilet in their house.
“We had running cold water, but we had to heat all of our water on the stovetop to wash the dishes to do the cleaning,” she explained.
As a result, everyone had to trek outside to a makeshift wooden outhouse to use the bathroom.
It was badly made and was just four walls of wood with one being a door and a manmade hole in the ground for relatives to do their business.
Swartzentruber also revealed that her family didn’t even use toilet paper and wiped themselves with a newspaper that they would just throw into the manmade bathroom.
The item was not very common in Amish outhouses when Swartzentruber was younger.
“In my grandma’s house, there was toilet paper, but in a lot of Amish houses there was none,” she explained.
Having it in your home was not considered a necessity but rather seen as a luxury.
“We always kind of thought she was too fancy or too big to use newspaper, but I am not sure why,” she said.
When she got a little older, her parents bought a new house on a “new big farm” that fit all eleven children.
It was a far cry from the small three-bedroom property they lived in before.
We were so happy to have a nice outhouse attached to the house instead of having to go outside in the winter.
Naomi Swartzentruber
“Attached to it was a wash house and it had a hall. We went from the kitchen to this little closed-in porch, through the halls to the wash house,” she explained.
Their new bathroom format was a “much better system than before.”
Even though they had to go outside, they were no longer technically outdoors because it was connected.
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It also came with a leech bed set up through the outhouse that would flush it out.
“We were so happy to have a nice outhouse attached to the house instead of having to go outside in the winter,” she said.
“They have a trash can in the outhouse, so you don’t put the toilet paper in there,” she explained.
They’re upgrading their lives. Almost all of them use toilet paper now
Naomi Swartzentruber
“Just poop and the pee goes down and you wipe and you throw it in the trash can. Because that way they’ll drain the water,” she explained.
“When it would get cooler, my brothers would empty the outhouse as well when they hauled the manure out of the barn.”
Recently, she went to visit the community and noticed that there was toilet paper.
“I was like ‘Oh, my goodness. They’re upgrading their lives.’ Almost all of them use toilet paper now,” she said.
As a social media personality with almost 200,000 followers on TikTok, she went into further detail about the bathroom situation in a viral video.
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Here are some tips to help you when you clean your home next:
Many Amish washed themselves with rags and only cleaned necessary parts because they didn’t have a shower.
To take a bath, she said that her family lugged down to the basement and sat in a big cast iron kettle near the back of their home.
Swartzentruber explained they usually used it once on Saturday nights only and sometimes in the summer on Wednesdays.
At the time, it wasn’t seen as vital to their lifestyle, but she added that Amish now take baths all the time.
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