by Barbara Goldberg

I started thinking about the upcoming 7 Gallon Challenge and what might be easy or difficult to cut back on. The easy one for me was fewer flushes a day. Living alone, no one else would be impacted by what sits for a while in my toilet!

Before I actually took the 7 Gallon Challenge, I decided to do a “test market”—going through my day, thinking consciously about my water usage and how it might feel to cut back on certain things. It didn’t take long to discover that the prospect of taking a short shower didn’t feel so great. As I stood under the hot, flowing water for a few minutes, my higher self said, “Enough, turn off the water!” But my body answered, “Don’t you dare!!”

I was luxuriating in the pleasure of a hot shower and didn’t want it to end. I suspect you can relate, yes? But is a hot shower really a “luxury?” For most of us, maybe not. We have ready access to water with the turn of a tap.

For the people in rural West Africa, better known as “the bush,” a hot shower is something most will never experience. I thought of this as I visited villages in Niger for the first time in 2009. We celebrated with people who had just been given a safe water well and their joy could not be contained.

Taking a shower after I came home, this thought struck me: the people who got a well in their village were fortunate for so many reasons, but they will never experience the pleasure of taking a hot shower. There is no plumbing in these remote villages, no hot water, no way to heat sufficient quantities of water for a shower.

A hot shower—such a small thing in comparison to the live-saving benefits of safe water—but yet it is still something these people will never have. It made me realize how fortunate I am to have been born in a developed country and to have, among the many good things in my life, the ability to luxuriate in a hot shower.

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