H2Woah

                                                                        The bucket bath.

*Disregard references to pictures in the text below.  I did not upload the new pictures to my jump drive before leaving to the mall.  Maybe I will get back here in a month and will update this post.

               If you didn’t know, just like green is the new black, water will soon be/is the new oil.  Blue gold.  My homestay and time in South Africa has been filled with many great learning lessons, but I must say water has been the greatest. 

                When I first got here, they told us we are expected to bathe every morning and it is a good idea to do it at night too.  Your cleanliness is very important in South Africa.  I thought this was super wasteful.  In the States, I always try to save water whenever possible, i.e. not drinking pop, turning off the water when lathering, stretching my laundry day, etc.  The idea of showering twice a day seemed so wasteful to someone that prides themselves on showering, at most, 3 times a week.

                Do you see the picture of the bucket above?  That is what Gogo (my homestay mom) calls my “septic tank”.  After I take a bucket bath, brush my teeth, or wash clothes, I dump the water in the septic tank then dump it on the rocks to make them softer to smash for gravel (another story in itself…post idea!).  On an average day, I fill up the tank about half way.  On a clothes washing day (once a week because I wash some items in used bucket bath water), I probably fill the entire bucket.  Now one of the engineers in my corps (yes, there are multiple ones and their brains have been much welcomed), told me the average shower head uses 3 gallons of water per minute.  If you didn’t catch it, my septic tank looks like the 5 gallon buckets you get from Home Depot. 

                Do the math.  That means I use about 3 gallons of water a day or take a 1 minute shower.  Do I take a 1 minute shower in the States?  Does anyone?  After talking to fellow volunteers, my usual 5 minute shower is a pretty quick shower in USA terms.  This means if I lived the same lifestyle, I would have to fill and dump my septic tank 5 times a day just for a shower. 

                I collect the water every night from a spicket (also above).  I do it at night because the water is shutoff from 12-7 everyday and some days it is shut off longer.  It takes about 4 trips of walking about 100 feet from the kitchen to the front yard with two buckets to fill the family’s water bucket collection.  I kind of think this is a lot of work but Gogo says “this is great”.  20 years ago, during Apartheid, Gogo had to walk 5 km one way to fetch water, put the large bucket on her head, and walk it back.  She said she did this 3 times a day. 

                Mandela Day was July 18^th.  It is not a holiday from work, rather it is a regular day of work per Mandela’s wishes.  That is quite a motivating message from a man that was incarcerated for 27 years.  Despite all the injustices that were created by the old way of doing things, Mandela tells all to dig in deeper and build a nation together. 

 *Since I originally wrote this, Gogo had a bath tub installed in the house.  She is incredibly proud.