Bathrooms & Showers (aka Living Conditions)

One of the sweetest, most unexpected things about where we stayed was the fact that the villagers had BUILT us flushing toilets and set up little showers for us. This in a place where nobody had these themselves. This is Santiago:

Santiago is the coolest guy ever. He was the villager from La Reforma in charge of getting everything ready for us and basically organizing our expedition from the inside. He was so animated and so personable and just fun. (And, nope, he didn't speak English either. So I didn't talk a lot directly to him.) But anyways, I think it was his idea to build these showers and toilets for us. He was very proud of the showers. :-)

 This is the muddy pathway that leads to the bathrooms :-) Behind the 3 blue doors are 3 fully functional toilets. And inside the 3 green boxes that look like porta pottys are showerheads and wooden slats. The black tank on the top is what determined if we actually had water that day to make any of these things work. One day, 5 of the villagers were on the roof filling it up so that we could flush our toilets. The toilets worked pretty much every day at some point. If not, we filled up little buckets from the sink and threw them down the toilets to make them flush. The showers worked about every other day.
The sink in front is where we washed our hands and brought our bottled waters over to brush our teeth. And where they washed our cooking dishes. It was actually pretty dang nice.

 These are the little girls who stood here always and watched us do everything.

 Everywhere we went, there were chickens and ducks and turkeys and pigs. (Fewer pigs, they are expensive.)

We were awakened every morning by these roosters. 

This is the schoolhouse where we slept. My corner is in the
far back with the tall blue air mattress and two red suitcases.

One day, the shower broke, and I was dying to take a shower. Santiago rigged it up so that the hose fed into the door and I squatted down to use it. The showers didn't really have any place to hang your clean clothes, so I used a ziploc bag and put a hole in it and hung it up on a nail. I also brought a bar of soap, which was pretty messy and not too smart. Body wash is a lot cleaner in situations like this.
It was during these crazy cold shower times that I wondered if I was legitimately crazy for being there. :-)
We slept in a school house that was vented at the top. Right next to us was the kitchen, where tons of smoke came through from the stove and fires. Which meant that probably half of us woke up with sore throats and sinus infections on day 3 that lasted until we left. Luckily, I had Azithromycin (on the recommendation of my doctor) that I put off taking for one day, and then used, and it worked like a charm. I think it did give us some idea of what they go through every day.