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Music

This Guy Wants to Sell Festivalgoers Portable Showers In Order to Help Refugees

They're private and can be used anywhere.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

For campers at festivals from Coachella to Glastonbury, going three days without showering can prove to be a mild annoyance in the midst of dust-caked clothes and un-deodorized armpits, but for refugees overseas, the lack of such basic hygiene stations is a dire reality that lasts far beyond a long weekend.

As lifestyle magazine TakePart reports, a new creation by 22-year-old John Godfrey can serve both groups, but it will take the former's charity to impact the latter. Godfrey, a student at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland, has invented a collapsible shower that can be taken and used virtually anywhere. It comes with a hygiene pack that includes otherwise basic necessities such as soap, a face cloth, and a toothbrush; in addition to a shower head, ten-liter water reservoir, and a shower curtain to allow for privacy. Like the Toms shoe brand business model, he wants to donate a shower to refugees for every one sold (the price is estimated to be around $15).

According to TakePart, the idea was inspired by Godfrey's many festival excursions as well as a visit to a refugee camp in northern France's Calais. "It was an eye-opening experience, something you're never going to learn just by watching the news," he told TakePart. "To say that the conditions there were atrocious is an understatement."

While the concept of collapsible showers already exists, Godfrey's seems to be the only thus far to have a social enterprise aspect. Currently, he is looking for a major manufacturer to back the project, but as he stressed to TakePart, it should be only a temporary solution for the migrant crisis: "The real question is, Why aren't there any proper showers?"

Photo courtesy of John Godfrey