Here's one for the culture-clash experiences file:

I was coming out of the girls' bathroom at school and Nick was coming in, a tiny four-year-old girl in tow. "Actually," he said to me, breaking off, 'will you help her use the toilet?"
"No," I said, automatically and immediately.
"Come on," he begged, "will you? If you don't, I have to, and I think... I think it's better if you do."

It's not that Indonesian four year olds don't know how to use the toilet. They do. But the toilets in Indonesia are formed completely differently than Western toilets, and the school, for some reason, employs Western style toilets. Indonesian bathrooms consist of a slightly raised mesa, maybe 10 cm off the ground, with what we call a toilet seat embedded directly into the tile. You squat over it with your feet on the rim, level with the ground, and go. There's no flush; instead, there is a bucket or some kind of reservoir that is filled with water, and you dip a little ladle in, and pour three or four of them in until it 'flushes'.

So I go into the bathroom with the little girl, who is chattering away in Indonesian, interrupting herself only to point at the odd bathroom accoutrements and look up at me with wide trusting eyes as she asks me questions about them that I can neither understand nor answer. She stands next to the toilet, easily half her height, and looks at me. When making pulling-down-pants motions at her fails to inspire action, I lift her shirt and realize that what I thought were her pants are some kind of elaborate facade for her real pants, which (presumably) lie underneath somewhere, once you can get past the fifteen ribbons and buttons and zippers holding them up. What reason could there possibly be for dressing a four-year-old like that?

Finally, after peeling away all her deceptive clothing layers, she pushes my hand away and starts trying to climb up on top of the toilet. Attemps to get her down only elicit screaming, whining, and the odd spat tidak (no). She wants to stand on the three-foot-high toilet seat and just let loose pee in any random direction, which, from three feet, could end up anywhere, especially after she falls off, and she will: her many pairs of pants are still all bunched up around her ankles, just waiting to get peed on.

So I lift her, struggling and squirming, until she's sitting, more or less, on the toilet seat, but she is so small that if I were to let her go, she would fall in immediately. I am holding this girl suspended an inch above a Western toilet in Indonesia as she tries to pee as fast as she can because it's... weird to have to pee while a tall, scary blond stranger who can't speak your language holds you aloft and your pants drag around on the floor and your mommy is nowhere to be found (come to think of it, where is her mommy?) and there is a button that could whisk you down into a big vortex if this stranger lets go and this stranger didn't even know how to work pants, so how can you trust her holding you above a fucking vortex? and so on...