Agua.

With a set-up like the one I’ve got, who am I to complain? It’s selfish, I can’t deny that. I live across the street from people who have nothing more than mud and grass for a house, yet here I am sitting inside my little castle of concrete feeling stressed out about life.  Why?  Water.  That’s why.  Allow me to explain.

The dry season has been in full swing for about 6 or 7 months now, and I can’t even remember the last time it rained (Well, I can, but I was far, far away in Chamoio nearly 1000km away).  The ground is dry, it feels like a rock.  The wind blows, kicking up sand and leaving it everywhere, inside and out. My once white-walled home now has a brown tint to it, partially due to the dust and partially due to the dirty Bairro kids touching everything when they come over to hang out and play.  Luckily, the dry season happens during winter time here, so at least the temperature has been manageable; nice even.  But it’s September now, and that’s starting to change.  Summer is coming, and you can sense it as soon as you wake up cause you’re already starting to sweat.

So why am I stressed?  Well, this part of the dry season has some very undesirable consequences.  Because it hasn’t rained in close to half a year, the ground water level has diminished dramatically.  The river is drying up.  City wells are drying up.  Even people’s individual wells are drying up.  Water is disappearing.

During the rainy season, my house has running water most, if not all of the day.  But as I’ve mentioned like 84 times already, this is not the rainy season.  And, I’m quickly finding out how difficult life can be when you don’t have running water.

The water that gets piped to my house comes from a big water tower we have on the school campus.  A decently working pump pumps waters up to the tower from the aquifer deep below the school and city.  When it rains, the rain water soaks through the ground and reenters the aquifer, thus replenishing the supply.  When there lots of water, the pump doesn’t have to do much work and keeps the water flowing day and night (there are a few outages, but nothing serious).  I rarely had to ever dip into the reservoir that I have (I have a big trash can in my kitchen that I use to store water, maybe 30 or 40 gallons of it).  But after February it stops raining, and when it stops raining, the aquifer stops being replenished.  The water level starts to drop, and it continues to fall until the rains return some nine months later. 

With an ever falling water level, the pump is relied upon to do more work to lift water than it had to do the previous day.  Queue the outages.  Outages became common place as soon as it stopped raining.  At first, they weren’t so bad.  Rather than running day and night, the water was only on in the morning and sometimes at night.  A month later, it was only morning.  Around April, the water would usually only come on during the morning for a few hours on weekdays only.  This lasted for another month, and when the end of May arrived, I started losing water for days on end.  The outages were never longer than three days, and rarely even that in length, but then came August.  Three, four, and even five day would pass without water.

There are a lot of things in life that cause stress.  Relationships, school, work, family, friends, that baseball team you love that keeps letting you down in the hardest way, anything really.  In my opinion though, most, if not all of that pales in comparison to the stress you feel when you have no idea when you’ll have access to water again.  At least for me, this is the cause of a significant amount of stress.

So how do I deal with it?  Well, in a few ways.  First and foremost, I had to go find a new source.  One new source turned into two, and two into three.  The sources are wells of various quality that people have dug near their houses.  Today, I carted water from the third because the other two had dried up.  This first alternative source of water that I found was a hole in the ground next to my friend Chale’s house.  Literally, it’s nothing more than a really, really deep hole that doesn’t really have any protective walls, nor much of a cover, just a few bamboos sticks laid across the top (Quick side story:  A chicken fell in the other day and died because there was no way to get it out).  The water that I get from it is a cloudy, muddy mess filled with sediment and some dead bugs for extra flavor.  To get it, I throw a 5 liter plastic container that’s attached to 10 meters of very sketchy rope into the hole and wiggle it around until water fills it up.  Then, I pull it up, pour it out into my 5 gallon bucket and repeat the process  until the buckets full.  I’ve got two of these 5 gallon buckets, and once both are filled, I help one of my Barrio crianças put it on his head (I’ll throw him 5mts later for the help), put the other on mine, and together we walk the half kilometer back to my house.  Don’t let this quick little description fool you.  The carting processes it absolutely miserable. There are few things I hate more than having to put something on my head (not including hats), so to me, this is like having someone peel one of my fingernails off with some pliers.  It’s heavy, dirty, and leaking, not to mention the point on the bottom of the bucket that stabs deeper and deeper into your scalp with each bouncy step you take on the long hike home.  I hate it, but I have to do it.  It’s life here.

Realizing that I can minimize the number of times I cart water if I learn to conserve it better, I’ve taken some steps to changes my habits in regards to usage.  I’ve learned that you can recycle it, often using it two or three times to do what you need.  For example, I was my dishes in two buckets.  One bucket it to wash and clean the gunk off the dishes, and the second is to rinse the soap off.  I then take the wash basin with the gunky water and either flush my toilet with it or water some of my plants.  I then use the water in the rinse bucket as the new gunk-wash water, or I use it to wash some clothes.  It’s not really dirty, just has soap in it, so it really serves a secondary purpose well.  After a little laundry, I dispose of it in the same way. 
Water is not an issue back home (not like it is here at least).  It’s everywhere.  The city brings it to us, and we use it freely to do our biddings.  Jeez, we’ve even got little spouts on the corners of most city street where if we turn a knob, it’ll expel water in massive quantities.  I never thought about how much of a commodity water was, and I definitely never treated it as such.  Back home I kept the water running while brushing my teeth; I took 20 minutes showers just because I liked the way hot water feels; and I let a leaky faucet drip just cause I was too lazy to repair it. 

I never did any of that intense, multi-use conservation stuff back in the states, and if I return, I doubt that I will.  But while I might not manually flush a toilet with my dirty dish water, I will try to find other ways to change my water consumption habits.  Because it’s important, and after living here for a while, it’s something that I feel I need to do.

Side note:  Shout out to Travis Ramos, a friend of mine from Grad School at Colorado.  He recently started an incredible organization called Second Mile Water (2MW) and he and his team are working alongside disadvantaged communities to help them gain access to clean, safe drinking water with the goal that these people will never again have to live with the stress that amounts from not having it.  Check out the 2MW website here:  http://secondmilewater.org/