Actually, outhouses like you describe are still surprisingly common in poor rural areas in the U.S. also. When I was about 10, my family moved from an urban city environment to a very rural one.
While we had flush toilets and running water, there wasn't a public sewer system, everything ran into a large septic tank in the backyard. We had to call a guy to come out every few years to pump it out.
Several of my neighbors, while they had running water, didn't have toilets indoors. Their homes having been built basically by hand by the owners. They were decent enough homes, but if you had to go, you went out to their outhouse in the backyard, which was basically a deep hole in the ground over which was a wooden frame you could sit on. While they had toilet paper to clean up with afterwords, they were simply too poor to move the toilet indoors. Most of these same neighbors got most of their protein supply for the year during deer season or fishing in local farmer's ponds.
It also wasn't uncommon for my and my friends, while off playing around in the woods or out in a farmer's field to just find a secluded spot and do our business there.
Most of this wasn't a surprise to my father, who grew up in an area and a time where outhouses like this were perfectly normal for everybody and cleaning up afterwards usually involved tearing pages out from the Sears catalog or using dried out corn cobs.
For my mother, who grew up later and in a Rust Belt city, it practically terrorized her.
Septic tanks are common in rural areas, not just "poor" ones. I grew up in a household that was top 5%, both by personal wealth and household income. Beautiful house, nice property in a fairly rural suburb (100 houses in the community) But still, too remote to have a public sewer system running to it. Everyone had a septic tank, and they had to get pumped every few years.
They're also nothing like outhouses. You'd never know the difference, if you were just visiting someone's house, whether they had a septic tank or a sewer.
While we had flush toilets and running water, there wasn't a public sewer system, everything ran into a large septic tank in the backyard. We had to call a guy to come out every few years to pump it out.
Several of my neighbors, while they had running water, didn't have toilets indoors. Their homes having been built basically by hand by the owners. They were decent enough homes, but if you had to go, you went out to their outhouse in the backyard, which was basically a deep hole in the ground over which was a wooden frame you could sit on. While they had toilet paper to clean up with afterwords, they were simply too poor to move the toilet indoors. Most of these same neighbors got most of their protein supply for the year during deer season or fishing in local farmer's ponds.
It also wasn't uncommon for my and my friends, while off playing around in the woods or out in a farmer's field to just find a secluded spot and do our business there.
Most of this wasn't a surprise to my father, who grew up in an area and a time where outhouses like this were perfectly normal for everybody and cleaning up afterwards usually involved tearing pages out from the Sears catalog or using dried out corn cobs.
For my mother, who grew up later and in a Rust Belt city, it practically terrorized her.