Best idea comes second this week

You might be familiar with the bucket shower: a very low-tech way of washing. In a place like Timor, barely anyone has a shower that sprays water-- only bucket showers. How it works is that you use a little plastic hand-bucket to lift water out of a large sink or barrel, and pour that water over your (soapy) self.

It's fun, and I like it a lot.

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I know of a couple of other "bucket" showers... I used one kind at an army camp in Australia where water was scarce, and the shower was designed for great water efficiency: you would fill a two gallon canvas "bucket" from taps, and then hoist it overhead with a rope. A tap in the bottom of the bucket allowed you to release a shower of water to clean yourself with.

With this method, the cleanliness as a regular shower is possible while using very little water. You can get surprisingly fresh and clean by vigorously scrubbing under a small stream. Another advantage is that you can determine the exact temperature of your shower, which you cannot with the old school bucket method.

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What I have invented today is a hybrid method: the bottle shower. I feel terrible about the number of plastic bottles I use here. Despite concerted attempts to drink as much (boiled) water as possible from the pitchers at restaurants and only to buy water in the most efficient size (can't drink from the tap here), I've still got a few big plastic bottles on my hands.

If you're thinking that what I do is to fill them up with water and than shower with them, you're absolutely right. It affords me not only better aim and flow rate control (it's easy while taking a bucket shower to dump out all the water from the hand-bucket and completely miss yourself, or to simply pour more than you intended) but also helps me keep track of how much water I use, by counting the number of bottles.

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This is my contribution to the world today. You're welcome.