Outhouse

Decrevi · Posted: 05 Mar 2006 03:56 PM Post subject: Outhouse

When I had to visit my family at the ranchos I only wished to have an outhouse as nice as they have with their porta-potties. And try to go in the dark with just a flashlight, when I was a kid. Brings back NIGHTMARES Eek!

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URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11676210/
Virginia hamlet waits for indoor plumbing
Sewage treatment project drags on seven years just miles from mansions
By Amy Gardner
The Washington Post
Updated: 11:28 a.m. ET March 5, 2006

Less than a mile down the road from a million-dollar emblem of greater Washington's housing boom, Emma G. Howard and her son, Bishop, tote drinking water from neighbors or buy it at the Safeway eight miles away. They scrape their plates into a slop bucket on the kitchen floor and wash them in a basin of boiled water.
And they relieve themselves in a wood-planked outhouse across the back yard.
The Howards and 15 other people live in the western Loudoun County hamlet of Willisville. Surrounded by rolling pastures, horse-country manors and new mansions -- many with four or more bathrooms -- most of Willisville has existed without indoor plumbing since it was founded just after the Civil War, when freed slave Heuson Willis bought a cabin on three acres for $100.
It was terrible land then, and it is terrible today: soggy, heavy with clay, not fit for crops, pastures or, more recently, simple septic tanks. But on the eve of the 21st century, Loudoun officials promised to help. In 1999, the county received a state loan to build a small sewage treatment plant in Willisville.
Seven years later, at least six residents live with outhouses and no running water; an additional nine live in houses with failing septic systems. Construction on the sewage plant has not begun, and its projected cost has more than doubled, from $250,000 to about $600,000. Design delays, bureaucratic hurdles and government neglect have caused the Willisville On-Site Wastewater Treatment and Disposal Project to founder, county officials say.
"It's a travesty, I think," said the Rev. Reginald A. Early, who moved to Middleburg from Portsmouth, Va., in 2000 to become pastor of Willisville Chapel, which is among the properties with substandard plumbing. "Coming from the city and seeing some of our elders coming out of outhouses in the 21st century, it was just mind-boggling."
All the more outrageous, he said, is the proximity of luxurious new houses. Angela King, 43, can see one through the woods from her back door. King, who grew up in Willisville, is among its luckier residents; she has a failing system rather than none. But across the street, rented Johnny Blues stand outside the Smiths' and the Lees' homes, pumped clean by a service truck once a week. In those houses, family members keep chamber pots in their rooms at night...