Bonus blog -- the bucket shower challenge
Here is an idea for those of you who want to deepen your connection with your child’s Karatu homestay experience: take a bucket shower. You might think a bucket shower sounds easy – all you need is some water and soap & shampoo, and the force of gravity. Okay, if it is so easy, take the challenge:
1. Wake up 2-5 hours earlier than your growing adolescent body would normally wake up
2. Go to a room that is about the size of a midsized closet, with a small drain in the floor. (For some of us that room also includes the squat toilet)
3. Hang your towel and clothes unto nails on the wall
4. You get a bucket of very hot water and a bucket (or faucet) of cold water.
5. Use the large cup with a handle to mix the water to make the water you pour on your body a suitable temperature.
6. Wet yourself
7. Lather up – you can start head-first or torso-first, your call
8. Rinse
9. Dry yourself off
10. Then you have to attend to the fact that you have water all over the floor. Use the squeegee provided to get as much water down the drain as possible. (Most of the rooms are tiled, and water finds the space between the tiles).
11. Change into your clothes while you are still in the wet-floored room, as walking around the house in a towel is not appropriate. Try not to get your get your clothes (especially the pant legs) soaking wet. Dry your feet without toppling over.
Sounds easy? Give it a try…. But this first time is just a baseline…
Now, after the first try, you have to do it again, and this time:
1. Reduce the time of your shower by 25% (get efficient with your rinsing!) – try to get it down to about 5 minutes (good luck, especially those of you with hair)
2. Reduce your hot water usage by 20% (it is a cost to the host family to heat the water)
3. Reduce the water you leave on the floor by 15%
Some tips:
1. Make sure you bring all your stuff you need with you, because once you are wet, you don’t have the opportunity to go out and retrieve some forgotten item
2. It would help enormously if you could grow a third arm, because using your right hand to splash water under your left arm to rinse out the soap does not leave you a hand to swipe the soap out. Alternatively, if you can radically dislocate your arm from the socket, I suppose you could use your hand to pour water into the same-side armpit. But I recommend the third arm; scrubbing out the shampoo with one while pouring water with the other is difficult. In other words, rinsing takes a lot longer than you’d think, and you likely still have a thin film of soap residue on you and a little shampoo left in your hair. Applying conditioner is a fool’s errand.
Your child will expect a full report when we return.
