I want to take this opportunity to talk about toilet paper.

It’s a strange subject, but it’s one that everyone talks about here.

Every morning, you’ll hear the local toilet paper merchant yelling “Maharam, maharam!” from his one-seat car, hoping to lure customers by telling everyone what he’s selling.

Toilet paper is very important here. I guess it is everywhere. But here, it’s like a commodity.

Someone I interviewed for an article 5 years ago said, “We used to have to smuggle toilet paper in from Lebanon.” He told me not to quote him on that, but of course I couldn’t resist.

If you go to the bathroom in a public place, you usually have to bring you own toilet paper with you. This is because the item is so sought after that people will steal the entire roll of tissues from the bathroom before the next customer gets there. And this is in a country with one of the lowest rates of theft in the world, where many people leave their doors unlocked.

I must have been here at least a year before I realized that most restaurants charge for the box of tissues that’s on the table when you get there. That’s because so many people take the box of tissues home without asking, they figured they should charge for them.

Five years ago, in March 2003, I took a road trip from Damascus to Baghdad with a couple of friends. On the Syrian-Iraqi border, I asked to use the bathroom. Being used to the custom in Syria, I asked the Iraqi border guard for “maharam” before entering the stall. He didn’t understand, so I kept on repeating the word over and over (I was beginning to fear it was one of those countries you hear about on National Geographic that actually doesn’t use toilet tissue) . I finally made some sort of a gesture that he must have understood, because he immediately exclaimed, “Kleenex!”

Well, if that’s what they call it there, then that’s what I’ll call it – as long as I get my precious tissue paper.