Nairobi: questions/comments?!

Thursday, September 24, 2009

questions/comments?!

On the side bar I've included a short essay I wrote for my development class (POR #1)- feel free to shoot ideas back or comments- I'd love to hear what you think (not necessarily about grammar, style, or structure- but the ideas at hand)
and if you have questions- anything I'm not writing about that you want to know about- feel free to ask!

Below is my latest, super-long post from the Mombasa and this week~

1 comment:

Kimberly JohnsonSeptember 24, 2009 at 8:33 AM
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POR #1: Water

My host family's bathroom is a 6' by 10' space, with a tile floor, toilet, shower head, sink, and faucet about waist high directly from the wall. There is no shower stall of bathtub like you would see in almost every American home. There is no hot water heater in the form of a 50 gallon drum that requires lots of electricity and if not properly used wastes electricity by heating water unnecessarily.
It is intriguing to think that development, relating to water, would be considered a hot running shower, in a shower stall in most likely your second or third bathroom. When really, the ability to take a 45 minute steaming shower is a waste of multiple resources (now this depends on your definition of waste, but most likely we can agree on "excessive use").
At my home stay each family member has a basin. We heat water on the stove, pour it into the basin and bathe from the basin. From an environmental perspective this is a much more sustainable system and clearly uses less water than your average Western hot-water-heater heated shower.
Why then, would people consider basin bathing an undeveloped practice? And would people who think this then conversely be considered undeveloped themselves? (for their inability to adapt to a sustainable system which just doesn't carry the label of being developed.)
Why can't we share our knowledge of both distribution and acquisition of resources with knowledge of more sustainable systems?
I believe mutual globalization will being more "progress" than a top-down model.