Page 9

Next to the llavadora is a slanted section of concrete used for about anything water related. Clothes are washed here...as are hands, your teeth are brushed, and water buckets are filled to allow you to flush the toilet or take a shower.

Naturally, since there is a roof over the llavadora, the water is always fairly cold. By the time you fill a couple buckets and haul them a hundred or two hundred yards to the shower room, the water is even colder. To get a hot shower, you go to the kitchen and boil a pan or two of water to mix with the cold water from the llavadora. Of course, time constraints mean it will never be more than mildly warm, particularly since a shower takes 2 or 3 5-gallon buckets to get the job done.

There is a bowl in the shower room that is really the heart of the system. You dip it in the bucket and pour water over the target portion of your body...soap it up, then another bowl of water to rinse off. It is very difficult, by the way, to rinse properly.

Of course, there is a second method. When the town water is on, there is a hose in the shower room. The stream it produces will easily fill the two or three 5-gallon buckets in just 10 - 15 minutes with the coldest water you have seen outside the Arctic Circle. Then you dip a bowl into the bucket, pour the water on the target portion of your body...basically, all it does is make the water colder but save you a few hundred steps.