Bucket bathing in the campo

Last weekend all volunteers in training had to go visit a current volunteer at their site to see what the life of a volunteer is like. The trip in and of itself was quite entertaining as it ended with another trainee and me getting a ride from a Paraguayan guy (don’t worry, our volunteer was friends with him and had called in a favor) 40 minutes up the mountain through muddy, roads filled with pot-holes and ruts because the campo bus does not go through the campo when it rains. Oh, and did I mention this was a two-seater, stick-shift truck and somehow we fit the driver, two of us trainees, and two extremely large backpacks inside. I ended up sitting kind of sideways facing the steering wheel with one arm around the other trainee and the other arm falling asleep while the driver kept hitting my leg every time he switched gears. I found the whole thing quite entertaining.
When we finally arrived and went inside I felt like we had arrived in a sanctuary. Both me and the other trainee had gotten up at 5:30, walked half an hour, taken two busses after having waited over an hour for one of them, and stood for over 2 and a half hours on the second bus, not to mention the uncomfortable car ride up the mountain. Our volunteer had comfortable beds for both of us and told us she would cook us American food while we were there. I think I stopped mid-sentence when she pulled out the peanut butter jar and came close to jumping up and hugging her when she told me she had American coffee and a coffee maker. That night we had tacos with cheddar cheese she had brought back from the states and amazing guacamole and I remembered again how much I love real cheddar cheese (which by the way you can not buy in Paraguay).
Now before you go thinking she lives in some snazzy place let me tell you a little bit about her site. She lives in a campo that is 10k away from the nearest city and the bus only comes through her site 3 times a week, unless of course it rains, in which case it’s less than 3 times a week as we had the pleasure of experiencing. She’s also about 6-8k away from any other English speaking people and she lives on a mountain (or at least a mountain in Paraguay terms). No one in her site has running water, so she gets all her water from her well, uses a latrine, and bathes in a bucket. That means that every drop of water from drinking water to water she washes her dishes in and water she uses to brush her teeth has to get pulled up from a bucket in the well. Her latrine was built with the intention of having running water in the next few years, so it is an actual toilet seat and after you go to the bathroom you just pour water down to flush, which makes it pretty close to a normal toilet. The bucket bath was the fun part and after experiencing that, the possibility of not having running water doesn’t freak me out at all anymore. You basically have to squat down on the ground to wash yourself off and the only hard part is making sure you got all the shampoo out of your hair. While this whole daily ritual probably seems insane, it’s really quite simple, and I found it well worth the prize of a constant supply of peanut butter, coffee, and cheddar cheese for the weekend.