Keeping Cool In The Sahara

Here in Morocco, people tend to keep their front doors and street-level front windows shuttered most of the time for privacy. Since the Sahara summer heat set in, I can't help but get the impression that a few people have started opening their front doors and front windows, presumably to give a little relief from the heat.

During the summer I always keep my windows open when I'm in town. Since it's always darker in my front room than it is outside, people can never see into my apartment, even at night. There's a floodlight directly over the front door of my apartment, so even at night people can't see into my apartment, since it's still brighter outside than it is inside my apartment.

I'll deal with the dust which blows into the apartment, because it really is much more comfortable in the apartment when the windows are open. Moroccans often throw water onto the dirt in front of their homes, to prevent it from blowing into their homes. That's one way to try to prevent the dust and dirt from coming inside.

In addition to keeping the windows open, I've also been keeping cool by taking slightly cool showers. I'm certainly grateful that I have a shower in my apartment! Given how feebly the water trickles out of it, I don't feel bad about taking as many showers as I take, since I'm not using a lot of water when I shower! And at the meager rate of 2.37 dirhams per cubic meter (about 19 cents per cubic meter), after taxes and fees, my water bill runs around 50 dirhams, or around 6 dollars, for each three-month period. Usually I've split the water bill with whatever neighbor I've had in the apartment building. My most recent neighbor, who had been teaching French at the local primary school, got his transfer approved to a school out west on the coast, and he moved there, so I'm back to living in the building by myself. Even paying the water bill by myself, it's still easily a manageable expense! So I'm certainly thankful to God that I have running water and can take cool showers in this heat!

The Luxury of a Hot Shower

I am blessed in many ways, including by having a shower in my apartment where I live down in the Sahara. Unfortunately, I don't have hot running water, which means that when I take a shower at home here in Morocco, it's a cold shower. Consequently, during this time of the year, in autumn and winter, when I'm in my town, I delay taking showers for as many days as I can, to avoid taking cold showers during cold weather.

Thus when I was in Rabat this week for my MSM (mid-service medical exam), it was with great delight that I took a hot shower last night in the hotel where I was staying. I reveled in the luxury of it. It was so much more enjoyable than hot showers which I've taken in the states, surely because it had been so long since I'd had one. Looking back at how I failed to appreciate hot showers as much when I still lived in the US, I thought of how, so often, we don't appreciate something until it's gone. And how many of us take for granted conveniences we have which others, living elsewhere in the world, don't have.

Cold Showers and Squat Toilets

In the last few weeks, it has gotten a little bit hotter at my site here in the Sahara Desert. So I have been enjoying cold showers more than I previously had been enjoying them.

Which brings me to the bathroom I have in my apartment. I am fortunate enough to have a shower in my apartment. While the shower head and shower cord seem fairly old, causing the water to fall out of the shower head as well as be propelled weakly out, I am just grateful to even have a shower at all!

The water from the shower runs onto the floor of the bathroom, which is tiled like walls of showers in the USA are tiled. The water from the shower then makes its way to the drain in the toilet, which is immediately adjacent to the shower. However, unlike the toilets most commonly seen in the USA, in the bathroom in my apartment is a squat toilet. The squat toilet is a square of porcelain a couple of feet wide on each side. It has a couple of grooved foot pads, on which you can step and stand while you use the toilet, which are parallel to, and at the same height as, the floor. The porcelain in the rest of the squat toilet slopes downward toward the drain in the squat toilet. As most of you probably already know, there is no seat; one uses it by squatting over it, rather than sitting as in the USA. And one "flushes" it by pouring a bucket of water into the drain in the middle of the squat toilet.

Earlier this month, while taking a shower, the thing I had most feared for months finally happened: I dropped the bar of soap. While that isn't necessarily a problem when it happens, it can be, given that the shower is so close to the squat toilet, and that the shower water drains into the squat toilet. I turned around just in time to see the bar of soap disappearing from view as it descended into the drain. The next thing I thought was, "Well, that's one bar of soap that I'll never see again."