My Own Personal ONE BUCKET Challenge

by Angela Stanfield – Ontario, Canada

Water is so important for life.  In western society we all depend on a ready supply of clean, filtered water that we can use to drink, cook, clean and bathe.  This is not always true in other parts of the world.  That is why organisations like The Waterbearers raise money to assist those in need of clean sources of water, and they promote challenges to others to bring awareness to the vital importance of access to clean water for everyone. 

One such challenge was recently posted to take place in tandem with this upcoming World Water Day on March 22, 2022.  It is called the ONE BUCKET Challenge.  The concept is simple, use only the equivalent of one bucket of water to drink, clean, cook and bathe in for one day.   The challenge is meant to ask one simple question, how would you prioritise your water needs and the needs of your family if you had only one bucket of water a day?

When I received the email about the challenge just after the New Year, I had immediately accepted it.  I thought it was a beautiful and insightful way to engage people and to help bring the awareness closer to home.  That, and I am always up for a challenge.  However, as fate would have it, I got to experience the challenge in real life, long before March 22nd.  It has helped me to learn a thing or two about water consumption which I would like to pass on to you should you decide to take on the challenge for yourself. 

This year we have been having a particularly cold winter in central Ontario, Canada.  The neighbourhood where I live is in a rural area and the water systems are old and antiquated, with the pipes not buried as deep as they likely should be.  As a result, the entire water system for the whole neighbourhood froze solid and we were without direct access to water for nearly two weeks. 

Fortunately, as a Waterbearer I have learned to keep clean drinking water on hand should we lose access.  Power failures are also common in rural areas of Ontario and this can stop access to water as the pumps rely on power to work.  For this reason, I always have water stored in the house to last for a couple of days.  When the water froze, I was already prepared.  Are you?

Now after a few weeks, with our frozen crisis averted and thankfully no pipes broken, I am ready to share a few tips and tricks that I have learned about prioritising water consumption. 

1. Let go of the need to do laundry, or any major cleaning.  If you are a bit of a clean freak you may have to step back from this and let it go.  There is simply not enough water to do these simple daily chores.  My family had to collect up their laundry and wait until we could get access to other family member’s washer and dryer at the end of each week.  Since the bucket challenge is only one day, letting go of laundry and major cleaning will likely be relatively easy, but think about how you would manage if there was a prolonged water crisis.  How would you juggle your resources to compensate? 

• Let go of showers and relax your personal hygiene requirements because there is simply not enough water.  Get use to a small bowl of water being your only source to clean your body and brush your teeth.  BEWARE, you have to plan ahead with the sequence of actions you are going to take or else you may accidentally use soap too soon, before you brush your teeth or wipe your face off.  Here is my sequence: use water to wet toothbrush, after brushing teeth wash face using a wet face cloth, then apply soap to facecloth and get all the private and stinky bits clean as best you can.  DO NOT put the soapy cloth back in the clean water.  Discard the soapy cloth, get a new one, wet it in the bowl with some of your dwindling water and use that to rinse the soapy bits.  When you have completed your body then rinse out the soapy cloth and use the use water to flush the toothpaste you spat in the sink down the drain. I found doing it this way made sure I got all the soap off my body so it did not dry out my skin and flushed all the waste down the sink.  The most important part I used every last drop of water for something.  Again, this may not be a difficult part of the challenge for most people because they can simply have a shower the night before and a quick wash the next would be no big deal.  But imagine if you could not have a shower the night before.   How long was it since you had a shower? What if you did not know when you would be able to fully clean yourself again?  What would you do then? Once again, how would you compensate?

• Separate your waste and waste water to use for various things.  This involves talking about a rather gross subject but a very important one, human waste.  In the western world we do not tend to think much about where our waste goes after it leaves our bodies.  That is what the toilet is for, right.  However, remember with the One Bucket challenge you would not be able to flush your toilet for the whole day, because one flush would use your entire day’s worth of water.  My family and I simply could not flush because we did not have the water, so we got inventive.  We separated our waste by peeing in our porta-potty and using the urine collected to flush the solid wastes we deposited in the toilet. The amount of water the western world uses just to flush waste is immense, but if that was not an option, what would you do?                                                                                                                                

• Keep an eye on the amount of dishes and pots and pans you produce in a day.  The more dishes, the more water needed to wash them.  My family and I decided to eat as light a possible and to reuse the same cup, cutlery and plates throughout the day, just giving them a quick rinse with a wet cloth and vinegar.  Then at the end of the day we would have a main meal and clean up all the dishes at once.  We did not simply waste this water either.  Once we were done the dishes, it was collected in a bucket and kept in the bath tub for times when the toilet needed flushing but there was nothing to flush it with.  This is how I learned that every last drop of water can be used in multiple ways, multiple times.  It also really got me thinking about the cycles of water in the natural world and how it is used in multiple ways multiple times over. 

• Remember to drink your daily intake of water.  My family drinks a lot of water.  Other than coffee, tea and the occasional juice all we drink is water, so for us not to have access is a big deal.  I found that my family’s daily intake dropped a bit because they naturally wanted to conserve water.  Try not to do this and remember if you have coffee, tea or other beverages outside the house on the One Bucket challenge that amount of water counts towards your usage.  Many of us do not think about these things as we go about our day because we have ready access to them.  However, we forget that there are people in this world who simply do not have the option to add beverages from Tim Horton’s or Starbucks to their daily fluid intake.  Their water comes from a contaminated stream five kilometres away.

These are my ONE BUCKET Challenge tips and tricks for you follow if you decide to take it on.  However, I would like to one up this challenge for those that dare to give it a whirl.  Why not shut your water off for more than just one day, do it for two, three of four days? Get a real sense of just how important a role water plays in our lives.  I never even talked about things like watering house plants or even our pets.  Animals and plants whether in a home or on a farm need water too.  How do we ensure they have enough water to survive? 

The ONE BUCKET Challenge is a great first step for people to understand the importance of water in their daily lives.  Please go to thewaterbearers.org to take up the challenge and encourage other to do so too.  Remember to support The Waterbearers as they celebrate World Water Day on March 22, 2022.