Of the many skills that I have acquired as a Peace Corps Volunteer perhaps the most useful so far is expertise in bathing and shaving my legs in a gallon bucket that once contained green paint the color of my wall. There's this joke in the Peace Corps about how volunteers don't see a glass half empty, they see a glass half full and then they take a bath in it. I always thought it was kind of a dumb joke, but it's getting funnier.
In Rinconada Llicuar, the town where I live they turn on the water in the public water system for a couple of hours every other morning. Everyone fills up every thing in the house that will stand still. There are always at least a couple of big plastic garbage cans, 5 gallon buckets, enormous cooking pots, and in the case of my house, 1 gallon paint cans. Some older families also have ceramic pots big enough for me to crawl into. Somehow with all of the washing and cooking and bathing and cleaning that goes on the water starts to run really short by the evening of the second day. I enjoy trying to be clean, but I'm still wary of using too much water since I'm living in a house with a family of 3 kids, a mom, a dad, an uncle, and little ole me. I was standing over the paint can that the kids use to bathe and I was noticing that there wasn't really going to be enough water to fill up the larger bucket that the adults usually use. Alrighty then, I put some hot water from the kettle in the kid can and filled up the rest with cool water. In the bathroom with my tin cup, my cotton washcloth, my razor, and the gallon paint can I was giggling like crazy. The family probably thinks I'm bananas, but I didn't think that they would get it... and I thought that it was damn hilarious. When I was done: nice bald legs, un-smelly self, and not a drop of soap left on me. It's all about the tin cup and cotton washcloth.
My new travel recommendation and addendum to what we learned from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: never leave home without your tin cup and cotton towel.
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