Schools are called the students' "second home". Our teachers are our second parents, our classmates are our second siblings, our canteens are our second kitchen, and our classrooms are our second rooms. But in Tanza National Trade School (TNTS), one thing is missing from this so-called "home": the comfort rooms.

It's been a struggle for us to find an available comfort room, because most of them are either broken and out of order, used as a storage room, or there is no caretaker to take care of the comfort room's cleanliness. As such, we tend to suppress and ignore the call of nature (i.e., the bodily urge to urinate or defecate, in Tagalog, umihi o tumae) until we go home.

According to Dr. Chamandeep Bali, a naturopathic doctor at the Toronto Naturopathic Health Clinic, holding your pee can cause your body to lose the ability to know when to go, your bladder to become a breeding ground for bacteria and can cause infections that can spread throughout the entire body, and suffer from urinary tract infection (UTI), interstitial cystitis, kidney stones, and even kidney failure.

Holding in your poop, on the other hand, can lead to unnecessary constipation that could potentially cause colon damage, distended bowels and problems with normal stooling in the near future, according to Spencer Nadolsky, D.O., a family physician, and Alison Chen, N.D., and author of What Your Poo Says About You.

And as such, there really is a need for the comfort rooms to be fixed and maintained.

Of course, we can't fix and maintain the comfort rooms ourselves. This is why we are asking for your support to alert and notify the current administration of TNTS about this ongoing issue within the school premises. By signing this petition, we are one step closer to achieving the complete "second home" experience.