In
the following paragraphs, I will attempt to convey the ecstasy I experience
during my evening bucket bath. First I
need to set the mood. Put yourself in my
shoes for a second. As I wake up at 6am
in the morning, the pleasant 75 degree nighttime temperature is already
beginning to rise as the sun climbs in the sky.
Training attire is business casual, which in Burkina just means pants
and a collared shirt, but the Socal native in me questions the logic of pants
in such a hot climate. I finish my morning routine, eat my breakfast of a
couple rolls or something that resembles a squashed baguette, wash it down with
some tea, and meet the other trainees in my village to bike up the 12 km slow
incline to our training site in Leo.
Although
there’s a light breeze as we bike along at a comfortable pace, we are all still
dripping sweat by the time we make it to our training site. At 8am, our training classes start: in an
outdoor pavilion if we’re lucky, and in a building we have dubbed “The Sauna”
if we have the misfortune of a Powerpoint lecture. We listen to lectures and participate in
training activities until 12:30, when we break for lunch. By this point, the temperature has risen to
at least a humid 90, and we bike/sweat our way to one of the few restaurants in
town with electricity (and therefore cold drinks). More to come on the cuisine in a later post.
Back
to training from 2-5:15pm: the hardest part of the day. Exhausted from the heat, we sit through another
3 hours of class before we are released to bike home to Sanga. The bike home feels amazing. It’s almost all
downhill and the day is finally starting to cool off. The breeze dries most of the sweat on your
face while the sweat on your clothes evaporates, cooling the material against
your body. Looking back, I often see a
beautiful sunset over the fields and trees of the region. As I walk into my
courtyard and greet my host family, there is only one thing on my mind. Bucket
bath.
Truth
be told, I’ve been zoning out and fantasizing about my evening bucket bath
since lunch. I didn’t think of much else
on the ride home besides what limbs of my body I would give up for a big hunk
of medium rare steak. I fill my 10L
bucket from the water jug my family leaves me every morning, take off my sweaty
clothes, and carry my soap and my 0.5L cup to the shower.
Alright
so it’s not really a shower, because I am living without running water or
electricity. It’s more like a stall with
chest high walls and a drain on one side.
The “bathroom” is formatted like this:
--------------------------------------------------------
I Latrine I Shower I
I I I
I O ßHole I I
I in the ground I I
I I I
I -----------------I----------------
Therefore, it’s similar living in an apartment with
only one bathroom in the sense that it would be extremely awkward for two
people to use it at the same time. There
are indoor showers in the houses of other volunteers, but that’s a huge
disadvantage for a number of reasons which I hope to make clear.
I set my bucket down in the corner of the shower,
fill the cup from the bucket, and begin systematically pouring sweet, cold,
fresh, water all over my sweaty, dusty, and exhausted body. It would be hard to determine the exact
composition of my sweat, but it’s probably some combination of water, salt, and
the oily sauce that drenched my rice at lunch.
After rinsing, I usually take a couple minutes to
survey my surroundings over the chest high wall of the bathroom. When I look back towards the courtyard I
might catch some of the kids staring at me or witness the five cows being
herded past the bathroom after a day in the fields. When I look out towards the
main dirt road I might see locals walking or cruising by on bikes and
motorcycles. A bush taxi (extremely
overcrowded van/truck that Burkinabe use to travel farther distances) or two
may race by blaring its horn, similar to a train blowing its whistle as it
enters a town. But the sky is my
favorite part. I bathe at dusk, when the
sky still retains some of the hues of the sunset and the breeze begins to pick
up.
I soap up and rinse off again, ironically cleaning
myself better than I ever did at home with running water. Then I stand around and air dry for a bit,
enjoying the freedom of being naked and clean outside, relishing the views, and
occasionally reflecting on the amazingly simple living situation I have agreed
to for the next couple years. By now
it’s dark and the stars are beginning to fill the night sky. It turns out that you can actually see
hundreds of thousands of those shiny beautiful balls of light when you are
living far from the pollution of city lights.
By now I hope I’ve conveyed the ecstasy of my
evening bucket bath and improved your day with subconscious thoughts of my
naked self in the heart of West Africa. If that wasn’t as exciting as I led you
to believe, you can imagine some lions and giraffes around my shower too.
Todd
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