If you gotta go, go to America.

“Wait a minute. Hold it,” you say. No, you don’t have to hold it! In America public restrooms are more plentiful than any other country. Go to just about any public building in the United States and you’ll be relieved to know you can relieve yourself.

Most of our public restrooms are easy to find, free to use, generally clean, feature automatic faucets and flushes, a seemingly excessive number of stalls and urinals, and your choice between paper towels or an automatic drier so noisily powerful it feels like a personal hurricane for your hands.

In America, Land of the 44 fl. oz. Super Big Gulp, provision of public potties for our bloated bladders is required by law. Many states also mandate porcelain parity for men and women. And ladies, in New York City all new public buildings must offer twice as many toilets for women as men—surely history’s greatest victory for the women’s movement.

Compare America’s rich bounty of bathrooms with, say, Her Majesty’s England where public thrones are in short supply. Ironically, it was an Englishman, John Harington, who invented the flush toilet in 1596, but good luck finding a “John” when on a jolly walkabout in Britain. The UK has no law requiring the public provision of Harrington’s contraption.

Ask an Englishman “Kind Sir, where’s the loo?”, and he’ll probably direct you down a dark alley, up a few flights of rickety stairs, and to the end of a narrow hallway. When you arrive at the small, dank WC you may have to insert a £1 coin to use a primitive porcelain appliance that looks like something John Harington might have built in the late 16^th century.

The rest of Europe isn’t much better, and most of the world is much worse. And that’s actually a serious problem. Billions of people live without access to sanitary toilet facilities, and the health and environmental consequences can be severe. That’s why America’s best-known philanthropist, Bill Gates, launched a $42 million grant to develop and distribute innovative, hygienic, lo-tech toilets in least developed nations.

It’s only fitting that the nation that leads the world in domestic access to restrooms would lead in making toilets more accessible around world. Maybe in a few year’s time, if a person in Kenya needs to relieve himself, he’ll ask someone, “Excuse me, where’s the ‘Bill’?”