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What better way to start my Peace Corps blog than with a look at my Dominican bathroom? It’s the first time I’ve lived without hot or running water. As you can see, the sink faucet has been disabled, and you can’t see, but there’s no shower head. The toilet flushes sometimes; rumor has it that the water “arrives” on Tuesday, and I´ve been meaning to ask host mama Doña Luisa when we have water and why exactly we don’t have it more consistently. At any rate, for most of the week we let the yellow mellow, and then for the brown you give it a half bucket of water. Unsurprisingly, after a few days of drowning pounds of feces with maybe a half-gallon of agua, the places gets stinky. So I try to save my dirty work for el centro de Entrena, where we spend most of our days listening to lectures and throwing Frisbees.
As for showering, there’s a scoop in that extra big bucket. If it’s full enough you can dunk your head to wet your hair; not a problem if it isn’t because I have so little. Get the rest of your body wet with the scoop, soap up, rinse with the scoop. Pretty simple.
Brushing the teeth is more of a task, but I think I have a proceso at this point. I get my brush wet in the toilet-flushing bucket, since that’s probably cleaner than the showering bucket. I brush, and then spit into the toilet so I don’t have to clean the sink. Rinse in bucket.
I will not be shaving here.
Aparte: I’ve never found my Facebook news feed so mundane. And I haven’t read world news in 10 days.
