Water is a precious commodity in much of the world. Even water that isn’t exactly potable. Or transparent. Or nice-smelling. Just water that is wet is often good enough.
In a country like Tanzania, where the coastal areas receive 43 inches of water per year and mud is such an integral feature of the landscape for several months of the year, it is sadly ironic that water should still be such a precious commodity. Dar es Salaam has a fleet of bright blue trucks labeled “Maji Safi” (Clean Water) that drive all over the city delivering water to—and other blue trucks labeled “Maji Taka” (Dirty Water) taking effluent away from—homes that aren’t connected to the city water supply.
The lightweight plastic bucket has revolutionized life for people in much of the world, especially in Africa where water can be the limiting factor between life and death, and where distances from water sources to homes can be large. In many African societies it is women who assume the laborious job of carrying water to their homes, often atop their heads. Even small girls can carry more than their weight in water on their heads – an admirable feat in my opinion, as I seem to trip over my own feet even without a heavy burden on my head.
Those who can afford to keep water around do. Many households keep large black plastic cisterns of sizes ranging from 1000 liters to more than 50000 liters in the yard or on the roof. Since the problem seems more one of distribution than pure scarcity (there is plenty of rain, too much mud, and not enough water for daily life), I am a particular fan of rainwater catchment systems, which work if you have a decent roof surface area and enough money for the pipes to collect runoff from your roof and channel it into your cistern, from which it is pumped into your home or drawn from a spigot at the bottom of the tank.
It has been good preparation for my life ahead doing fieldwork to get used to bucket baths early. For most of the past 3 weeks there has been no running water, a problem Shekha attributes to the road work going on in the area. Indeed, there is frequently pooled water in the streets from broken pipes, yet none in the house (again, a distribution problem!). So we have been taking bucket baths for the past three weeks. The picture above is the actual bucket and the actual bathroom.
Bucket bathing is something one easily gets used to, and seeing how little water is required for an adequate bath has made me painfully aware how much water is wasted in showering, particularly showers of the 30-minute-plus variety. One morning I woke up, sweaty from the night before without electricity, to find not a drop of water in the buckets in the bathroom, and no idea where the neighborhood communal tap was to retrieve water myself (this is a task Ahmed typically performs). Then I remembered a single 12-ounce bottle of water in my room from a conference the week before. Believe it or not, I took a whole bath with 12 ounces of water (of course, I had to use the first 6 ounces 3 times!). While it took a lot of effort and wasn’t particularly pleasurable, it sufficed, I was clean, and it gave me a new appreciation for the kinds of things we take for granted – and the resources we waste – on a daily basis.
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