The One In Praise of Bucket Baths

Written on: le 28 Septembre 2010

I have just taken the second-best shower of my life.

Yesterday was the best shower, but I won’t bother you with that story. Abbreviated version: I was so hot that I was angry (like, angry-at-Jan-Brewer-for-signing-SB-1070-into-law angry), and by some grace I decided to go take a shower. Best decision of my Peace Corps life so far, hands down. Showering, I have determined, is my new favorite hobby – my peace and power, if you will – which brings us to today.

“Eye-dee” (French doesn’t pronounce H’s), my teenage host sister Georgina calls to me, followed by something in French I don’t understand. I ask her to repeat slowly, which she does, but alas my French comprehension is still too pathetic to siphon out even the slightest clue as to what she wants. Exasperated by my blank expression, she says in broken English, “My uncle meet you – mon oncle.” I apologize and hastily follow her to meet her “uncle,” who ends up introducing himself as her “professeur” but treats her like an object of affection. When he begins remarking on how she is “not a petite girl – no, she is a big girl” with a flirtatious snicker, I become uncomfortable. Not wanting to be rude, I socialize with him warmly nonetheless – after all, this is a different culture I’ve just been plopped into like Nemo into that dentist office fishtank, and maybe I’m missing something. But as my attention span and reserves of French vocabulary wane, I begin searching for a way out of the encounter. “Well,” I say chipperly when a pause arises, “I need to do my homework now” (haha, I’m like a kid in school again, I know). We exchange amicable goodbyes and off I go.

But do I really want to do my homework now, in my sweaty oven of a room, at 7 p.m.? Hell no. So I decide it’s the perfect occasion for indulging in my new favorite hobby.

For those of you who have never lived in a rural village with no electricity, running water, or plumbing of any kind, let me explain what taking a shower at 7 p.m. involves. First off, it’s pitch dark. It falls dark at about a quarter of 6 and my neighborhood becomes a whole different world. The only sign of human life is a sparse smattering of kerosene lamps and cell phone “torches” that glow like fireflies in the deep black night. So I grab my flashlight (I am too hot to tolerate my kerosene lamp at this point), my bucket, and toiletries and walk out into the dark. I am wearing just a pagne (a block of wax-print fabric) and tapettes (flip-flops). I take my bucket over to my family’s rainwater harvester, which serves as their source of water for drinking, cooking, bathing, cleaning, you name it, it comes from the rain. Pretty damn cool, I think Anyway, I dip a smaller bucket into the deep basin to draw water into my bathing bucket, and I’m set.

I waddle over to the shower/latrine, which is essentially a roofless stall constructed from the stems of palm fronds, dirt floor and all. This little stall is my slice of heaven, my zen garden, my #%@$ing happy place.

And so it begins. Bucket in hands. Water on head. Eyes on sky. Stars. Stars that point the way to magic, to primal ecstasy. Stars that tell you that life is sweet, that the smooth wet bliss on your skin is the sky’s way of saying “I love you,” that in your breath you are always home.

I linger in the shower for I don’t know how long, savoring every last drop in that bucket. Getting to know myself a little better, feeling for the first time phenomenally like a real-blood child of the rain and sky. Crickets chirp, heavy drums sound from a nearby church. Yes, I do pause to dart to the latrine, but not even that can interrupt the fact that I am happy, I am whole, I am home.

You might be reading this with a roll of the eyes, thinking that all those malaria pills have gone to my head. That I have fallen overboard into the dangerous tide of narcissistic myth-making, recreating the disgusting Peace-Corps-girl-awakens-her-soul-in-an-African-village cliché, romanticizing the mundane to a point of tired banality. To that I say: so what if I am. There is a lot of bad in this world, much of it close to home. The very “need” for the presence of Peace Corps in Togo traces its violent roots to a history of slavery and marginalization. My happiness here is not innocent.

There is plenty in this world to decry, but there is plenty more to celebrate. And if right now, in this moment, I can soak in the romance of a starlit shower, then yes, yes, yes I will.