The Bucket Bath List

I love baths. Whenever the opportunity for one arises, I pounce. Before leaving for Africa, I took a bath everyday for two months. I had a hunch this luxury wouldn't be available much longer. I was right. Now I bathe in a bucket. Today, dear reader, I will guide you through bucket bathing so that if you find yourself suddenly showerless, you won't be (too) stinky.

Step One: Select a suitable bucket. Mine is a large basin, This is good for catching and reusing water. You can splash as wrecklessly as you please and most of the water stays in the bucket. When your water tap is a couple hundred yards away, you want to keep water usage to a minimum. Some basins have pretty designs on the bottom. These are useless: the water will be opaque in one rinse.


Post bath water. Like I said, opaque.

Step Two: Heat one to two liters of water. Add cold water to taste. The exact ratio depends on the season. During the winter, hot water was the one small luxury I couldn't bear to skip.

Step Three (Optional, very optional): Shave. Fill a large cup of with water. Use this to rinse your razor. Don't use the basin, as you will needlessly mucky up the water.  When you rinse you don't want the water that was formerly on your legs to end up stuck to your shoulders. When finished shaving, dispose of the dirty water.

Step Four: Start at your head and work down. This step is crucial for women. Starting with your hair will reduce, not eliminate, the soap film that will permanently cling to your locks. Use your large cup to rinse. Don't try to dip your head into the bucket: you will get water up your nose. Do not lather and repeat--no conditioner either. You want to keep the amount of soap in the basin--and consequently, stuck to your body--to a minimum. Suds up the rest of your body ending with your feet. The heat, sand, and chacos are not kind to feet.

It's nice at this point to have clean water in another bucket to rinse with. The water in the first bucket will be extremely icky at this point. This step is also optional, however. Especially if reaching your tap involves a short hike.


View from my "shower."

Congratulations! You have just finished your first bucket bath. If your feeling fancy, spritz on your favorite perfume or bug spray. Now your ready to hit the village, paint the shebeen shanties (Namibian for bar) red, or maybe just curl up under your mosquito net and dream of hot water and claw-footed bath tubs. I think tonight I will choose the latter. 


Sideways picture of my basin and bucket. I couldn't figure out how to rotate it.

Like a Chicken with its Head Cut Off

Until August 10 I had never intentionally killed a vertebrate. I have remorselessly killed many insects. While I respect their ecological niches, if any chance exists they might crawl on me, I want them dead immediately. However, I feel more compassion toward vertebrates. They have highly developed nervous systems capable of experiencing intense pain, and I hesitate to cause them any.

Unfortunately, this approach has long been in conflict with my diet. I love meat. On the occasions I have opted for meatless meals, I always find myself envying my dining partner’s steak. Living in the US, it was easy to reconcile a cheeseburger with my distaste for gore. I understood mentally that meat processing involved carnage and pain. However, I didn’t understand it emotionally. When strolling along the aisles of a typical American grocery store, the meat is hardly recognizable as once belonging to an actual animal. The killing took place somewhere remote, and the result appears sterile. My attitude toward the individual animals was equally remote.

This distance ended abruptly during our Cultural Foods Day on August 10. It began with the delivery of two goats to our training center. Their lower bodies were restrained in bags, but they appeared calm. Undeterred by the prospect of eating these animals, the other trainees and I set about becoming attached to them. We petted, named, and sincerely tried to comfort them. I frantically tried to find an apple to feed them. I wanted them to enjoy a final dessert, but one of my Namibian coworkers stopped me. He said we shouldn’t feed them so soon before slaughter.

We had only two goats, and the Americans and the Namibians mutually agreed slaughtering a large animal was best left to the locals. We felt slightly more confident with chickens. I emphasize “slightly.” Someone placed a box containing several scrawny chickens in the corner of the yard and called for a few volunteers to kill them. I couldn’t bring myself to do the deed initially. I opted to hold the chicken while another trainee cut off the head with a pocketknife. The chicken was remarkably calm until its head was no longer attached, then the body convulsed wildly, and I had to muster all my self control to keep it pinned to the ground. Later, one of the other chickens freed itself post-decapitation and energetically illustrated the idiom “jumping around like a chicken with its head cut off.” They really do hop and flap. It’s simultaneously unnerving and funny.

I eventually marshaled the courage to slaughter a chicken. One of my coworkers pinned down the body and I pulled its neck taut. As I put the knife to it, I lost a bit of my nerve and closed my eyes, which—in hindsight—was a bad idea given the close proximity of my fingers. Regardless, I still felt the knife saw through feather and sinew and bone. When I did open my eyes, I was holding the chicken’s head in my left hand, and the beak was soundlessly opening and closing.

I was surprised by my reaction during the first few hours afterward. I was fascinated with everything inside the chicken. Eggs developing inside a chicken look like an alien embryo station. The shell doesn’t grow until late in the process, so dozens of exposed yolks grow in a spiral pattern along some sort of placenta-like organ.

Along with this anatomical fascination, I temporarily developed a macabre sense of humor. I would move the lifeless beaks and narrate little puppet shows for my co-trainees who, being accommodating souls, would giggle uncomfortably. I have included a picture below of me playing with a goat head as evidence of this phenomenon.

Since then multiple people have told me about faster, cleaner, and more humane ways to kill a chicken. I do not plan to implement them anytime soon. Not because I plan to maim chickens willy nilly, but because I don’t plan to kill anything in the near future. I still eat chicken. I still feel conflicted about it. Slaughtering a chicken did little to resolve my moral ambivalence toward eating one. I alternate between feeling fine about the experience and feeling disgusted. However, meat is an integral part of Namibian cuisine and is almost impossible to avoid. I may reconsider my dietary decision to eat meat when I return to the States. However, for the next two years I will continue to enjoy my KFC, because, yes, KFC is in Namibia.

Procrastination, Preparation H, and Packing

I am a chronic procrastinator. Like all other chronic procrastinators, I swear to reform after every episode. But despite countless college essays that were written more by caffeine than by cognition, I still haven't mended my ways. Nowhere is this habit more evident than in my suitcase. It is empty and I depart in one week.

In my defense, the only thing I know about my living arrangements is that they will be within walking, biking, or hitchhiking distance of a school. Seeing that Namibia is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, second only to Mongolia, I can deduce that this school will probably be somewhere quite rural--rural and full of mosquitoes. Despite this display of detective work, I haven't been particularly proactive about my packing research, which extends to a few suggestions from current volunteers and an episode of Man vs Wild. If I follow Bear Grylls' lead, I will wash up on the Skeleton Coast (Namibia's northern coastline littered with rusting, abandoned ships) with nothing but a bowie knife, empty canteen, plastic garbage bag, and my own teeth. The last item is especially useful for decapitating poisonous snakes. While this light list appeals to my sense of adventure and would save me the hassle and expense of dragging two 50 pound suitcases through multiple airports, I am sure the Namibian customs officials would immediately dispatch me back to the U.S. in a straight jacket.

Although I haven't begun packing, I have made a list. So at the very least, I know what will be hastily stuffed into my suitcases by next Sunday. This list includes--among other items--a silk kimono, Tide pens, hemorrhoid medication, my star finder, iodine tablets, crayons, and candy--lots of American candy.

Now if only I could find space in my luggage for Bear Grylls.