Water. Hot.

The secret location where I am currently holed up completing my manuscript is a gift from the gods. A writers' grotto, courtesy of fairy godmother LX, who absorbed early in life the vital importance of A Room Of One's Own.

The one thing it lacks is hot water. It has cold running water in abundance. So to bathe, I fill the kettle and soup tureen and put them on two burners of the small electric cooker. When they are humming and steaming, I pick them up gingerly, with oven gloves, carry them carefully to the bathroom, and drop them into a large round washtub already half-filled with cold water.

The addition of close-to-boiling water plus immersion of hot metal containers gives me just enough water, at just the right temperature, for a bucket bath. The water cools quickly. So I squat, soap at high speed, scoop water over myself with a tumbler, towel down and dress before too many goosebumps rise on my flesh.

And I think how most of the world's women walk miles each day to fetch water. Then heat it on precious wood fires for basic needs. How four thousand children across the world die daily for lack of clean drinking water. How most of Kenya's population can only dream of a constant reliable supply of electricity, of heat, of the luxury of bathing in privacy.

I think too about all the Americans have never experienced life without hot showers. I recall an American friend who panicked when the water heater in his house broke down on a Friday. The prospect of a weekend without hot water on demand was so new, so terrifying, he didn't know what to do. He tried, bizarrely, to bathe his baby daughter in a tub of ice-cold water. The idea of heating up water up on a stove, sponging her down, never crossed his mind.

Naturally, she screamed blue murder.

This man has a PhD, has taught third-world literatures, is a dedicated community activist. Can discuss globalization, poverty, Marxism, with great fluency and insight. But he couldn't think his way through the challenge of how to clean an infant if he couldn't turn on a tap for an unlimited flow of hot water.