Posh Corps

I can’t tell you how many times volunteers have come to my site and have asked incredulously “THIS IS YOUR SITE?!” I consider myself very lucky, I live on the beach, I have a supermarket in my town that sells luxury items like Coke Zero, Doritos and boxes of Mac & Cheese, my host mom doesn’t yell at me to get out of the kitchen and I am also accustomed to running water 3 times a day, in the early morning, around lunchtime and in the evening for two hours each. Well, on Sunday I found myself taken out of the “Posh Corps” and put in a very unsavory position in which I went 2.5 days without running water. To write this is very trivial because half of the people who read this (Americans) will gasp at that number while many volunteers do not have running water in their site or it often comes out a murky brown color. Alas, I still am writing about it. For the past 2 days I have run to the faucet at the allotted times when water usually leaves, apprehensively waiting, hoping that glorious mixture of hydrogen and oxygen would come spilling into the sink. I went for a run on Sunday and cleaned myself with baby wipes; yesterday I resigned myself to skipping the exercising as to not add to my rank smell.

This morning I woke up early, nervously made my way into the kitchen and YES! I had never been so happy to see running water, I nearly did a cartwheel, except it was not the clear, clean water I was used to.  Plop. At midday today, the water did not come at it prescheduled time. Frack. Water is a whore, a tease who I previously thought I could count on but then leaves me for days and comes back but only to show up for a quickie. WAIT. Ten minutes before they shut off the water I decided to try it again. YIPEE! Here is it is again, this time it is renewed, pure. I rushed to the bathroom to grab a bucket and filled it until the last drop fell so I could bucket bathe this afternoon. Never have I ever been so excited to bucket bathe. It was luxurious. I didn’t have enough of the clean water for a complete cleanse so I began with the murky brown h20 and ended with the good stuff. I feel human again.

This blog post is an ode to volunteers in Peru and around the world who often goes days, months, and even the whole 2 years without running water, taking baths in the river or carrying buckets from the well. You are strong souls.