Bathrooms, bathrooms everywhere, but not a place to …

Our new house has eight bathrooms. It’s a Philippine thing – every bedroom has its own bathroom. We have four bedrooms. There’s also a guest bathroom, a bathroom in the playroom, a bathroom for our household helpers inside, and a bathroom for workers outside. God forbid that anyone should need to share.

One of the advantages of living in a place like the Philippines is, of course, the household help, so I don’t need to clean these many bathrooms myself. I’m not averse to doing a spot of cleaning here and there - I certainly did it readily in New Zealand, and have even held a job cleaning other people’s bathrooms (ok, as a teenager). But really, I don’t want to spend my ‘spare’ time now, as a mother of 3 under 5, cleaning 8 bathrooms when I don’t have to.

You’d think that with so many bathrooms, and helpers cleaning them almost daily, we’d all be fresh and squeaky clean all the time. It is, in fact, our habit to wash at least twice a day here. The heat, humidity and air pollution combo makes for quite grimy skin. There’s nothing quite like a cold shower on a hot, sticky afternoon, to calm the nerves and refresh the senses.

Lately, however, we’ve all been a little bit less than squeaky. Manila Water, (“We don’t just Lay Pipes, we Improve Lives.”) has been re-working the pipes in the entire village over the past two months. We have regularly been getting notices that the water will be turned off for 6 hours on such and such a day. To cope with that, we’ve been filling up buckets and containers when the water is ON, to last us when the water is OFF. And when it’s off, we all have Bucket Washes. I’ve perfected the art of the Bucket Wash. I can do all 3 children and myself with less than one bucket of water.

Today, however, has been pretty rough. We got a notice at the weekend informing us of the water outage yesterday. It was to be for 24 hours this time. So we did our usual water storage, and yesterday, when it got turned off, we used our Buckets, and we refrained from doing our laundry (that’s tough in a family of 5!) And we didn’t mop the floors. We got quite low on water, being longer than our usual ‘down time’, but we sent everyone off to school today (with unwashed hair), anticipating the arrival of the Water for 8am, so that we could catch up on the laundry, mop the floors and wash our hair – those of us left in the house. Well, 8am came and went, and still no water. It is now mid afternoon; some of us in the house have not had a wash today, our laundry pile is getting bigger and bigger and our floors and feet are even more grimy than usual. The bathrooms are pretty gross (use your imagination) and our drinking filter is just about dry. Manila Water is no where to be seen.

There is one working tap at the village gate which now has a long queue of people wielding buckets and bins. Our helpers have been and brought back some water for us, and I’m sure they’ll be there again if the water doesn’t come back soon.

Sometimes I really feel like I’m in a third world country. And then I realize – I am! And then I remember there are literally millions of people in this city living in squatter areas where there simply IS no piped water. They live out of buckets every day.

And I am grateful that I at least have the luxury of looking forward to a long, hot shower in a clean bathroom.

(In one of eight, at that.)