As we were awaiting the arrival of Sophia, we decided we were going to try cloth diapering. It seemed only logical in this place of growing trash heaps. As such, we registered for and received a diaper sprayer to go along with our cloth diapers. We were rather excited about this simple invention that attaches a sprayer to the toilet and allows you to clean the solid matter from diapers directly into the commode.
A few months before Sophia's arrival, we were blessed to have friends carry over baby gifts to us as they visited Kenya. Our diapers and sprayer arrived with our fearless leader from CMF in plenty of time for us to get things set up. We opened the packaging to see all that we would need, grateful that it only required something to trim plastic tubing to size. So we set out on the task of putting things together.
Our first realization that things didn't match up was with the flex pipe that came from the wall to deliver water to the toilet. No problem (we thought). We can just get another one from the hardware store with the small connection at one end to match the wall and a larger one to match the sprayer hardware.
Well...we tried 3/4" - too small. We tried 1" - too big. How could they not match??? These were the ONLY adapters they had! That is when we realized that the connections on our sprayer must be 7/8" and that fittings in the US must be different from fittings in Kenya (more precisely the UK since that's what everything in Kenya is based upon).
So, now we are stuck - what can we do with our fabulous new diaper sprayer that won't attach to the toilet?? Well, little did we know that we'd be going back to the US shortly after Sophia was born. While there, we hit up Home Depot to see if we could find a flex pipe that would do the trick. Easily enough we found a flex pipe to help us connect the sprayer unit to the water inlet in the wall (and learned that toilets are the only fixtures to use a 7/8" fitting...). In the midst of our search, though, we realized that we'd also need to figure out how to connect the unit to the toilet tank as well! So, to make a long story short, we ended up buying a new toilet fill valve to replace the existing one so that it too would have a 7/8" fitting.
A couple weeks ago (yes, we've been back for a while now, but just got around to doing this...), we took to the task of seeing if our shopping and deductive skills would pay off. Lots of water and a little ingenuity later, our sprayer is attached and functioning. Here are a few pictures of the finished product for your enjoyment. I hope you've enjoyed this rambling glimpse into our life of living with foreign toilets.
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| In the midst of our clean up from the change. |
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| The new inner workings of our toilet. As you can see, we even had to rig the tubing to work right as it didn't match our existing overflow valve... |
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| The beautiful sprayer. What a blessing for cloth diapering!! |
