One question comes up is how are the living conditions in the places where we serve. This one in particular is the amenities in the village.
This picture is the two available toilets/ squatty potties. The one on the right includes a shower head that can be used when you have electricity. Don’t get too excited, the water is still very cold; you just won’t have to pump it for yourself. We rarely had electricity, so I never got the opportunity to bathe with it.
This picture is the squatty potty and my body shower bucket.
These are our sinks that we could use to wash our hands and brush our teeth, but we were asked not to use the water to brush our teeth. We would use boiled water to rinse our mouth. The spiket only worked when there was electricity, and since that was rare, we normally just pumped our own water to wash our hands.
This is me washing my hair while pumping my own water to do so. The water was cold in the morning, so you would try to wait until the early afternoon when the sun had heat up the ground so that your water would come out just a bit warmer. You would shampoo your hair outside and then cleanse the rest of your body inside the right bathroom stall. For better and faster results, you would ask a buddy to pump your water while you washed your hair and you would pump the water while they pumped theirs. It was also much more fun to have a buddy to distract you from the cold water on your warm head.
Below is the place where we would dry our clothes after we hand washed them and scrubbed them with soap. In order to wash them, you would also have to pump your water into a container and let them soak for a minute, then you would scrub them with either detergent or a bar soap meant for laundry. Then you would make sure they were rinsed by pumping some water out and holding them under the spiket. Then you would squeeze the water out and let them dry by hanging them on a clothes line. Sometimes this drying process would take 2-3 days due to the weather.
