Did you know that:

• Every 40 seconds a child dies from water-related diseases?
• 40% of the world’s population don’t have access to a toilet?

Established in 2001, World Toilet Day was born out of a desire to raise global awareness of the 2.5 billion people who don’t have access to sanitation – That’s almost half the world’s population!

2013 marks the first year World Toilet Day has been recognised by the UN as an official day.

I am entering a competition over at Splash Direct who will donate £2 to Water Aid  for every entry – That’s a month’s worth of clean water for one person.

To enter the competition, all I have to do is to blog my funniest, or most disgusting, bathroom story, so here goes:

During the seven years I lived in Rome, in my twenties, I had quite a few different abodes. But probably the prettiest, was a semi-basemen flat on Gianicolo, one of the seven hills surrounding the city.

It was in a small, nineteenth century villa which sat in its own little garden. My flat had a tiny bathroom with a high window that looked out onto the chicken run practically at ground level. Most unhygienic!

One day I went to use the toilet and, on looking into the water in the bowl, before sitting down, I saw what looked like a brown rubber band. You know, like the ones the postman used to litter the streets with, before they started using red ones.

“What on earth?”, I thought. Sticking my head down into the bowl for a closer look, the ‘elastic band’ swirled around and a head came up out of the water, as if to bite off my nose EEEEEEeeeek, heeeelp, I screamed, running out of my flat up to the boys on the next floor. “Come quickly”, I said, (in Italian, of course). “There’s a monster in my toilet!” But, by the time we had got down to my flat, it had gone.

Apparently the Rome water comes from Lake Bracciano, where there are lots of eels. They do have eel traps all the way down, but some get through. That little beggar somehow found his way up the pipes into my toilet bowl.  Needless to say, that for several weeks following the incident I was very nervous about sitting on the toilet!

I am part of the #Blog4Sanitation movement setup by Splashdirect to raise awareness of the importance of global sanitation. Learn more about World Toilet Day.