Water is NOT a Simple Substance

By Katie

"Water is a problem here." This is a sentence we hear often, and let me tell you, it's the truth. We get and use our water in extremely different ways than those of you who live in North America. Here's a little picture tour of all things water in our neck of the woods.

Our water comes mainly in a truck. We call the water man when we're out. Sometimes it takes him 24 hours to come, but once we were without water for five LONG days because he kept putting off coming. We need water about every three weeks. The cost for 450 gallons is about $11.

We have two places that we keep the water; one is this tank, which provides the water for our toilet and shower through a tube to the house. Here the water man is filling it up.

The other place we keep water is in the pila in the back yard. On this day, the pila was empty so I was scrubbing it out. It gets dirty because it is open all the time. Once we tried covering it with a plastic tarp, but the mosquitos loved the nice protection the tarp gave and breed like crazy in the water. We never did that again!


After the time we waited for five days to get water, we bought a fifty gallon barrel so we could go to the local water pump when the water ran out and we were still waiting for the water man. On this day, our neighbors came with us and we loaded up every water container we could find in our truck.

After all the work at the pump, don't forget that there's still the work of unloading all the water into the pilas (water containers).

There are two other ways of acquiring water, both shown in this picture. You can see the PVC pipe cut in half and used as a downspout and the container that collects the rain water off the roof. The other is covered in the green tarp. It is a small cement-lined basin that has a spigot from the city. Sometimes there is a little bit of water that comes through this pipe. Our neighbors use both of these methods, but we do not.

Sometimes we get an unfortunate visitor in our water, these little squirmy bugs. We always pour bleach in the water, and we have a sock filled with a chemical that is supposed to kill them, but it's not always successful.

So thank goodness we use different water for drinking! We buy five-gallon jugs of drinking water from the store for about $1.50. We use a little more than five gallons per week.

We are fortunate to have a modern bathroom, most of our neighbors have outhouses. The water from the black tank flushes the toilets and provides water for the shower. The sink does not work. There is no hot water, so if we want to take a warm shower, we boil the water on our stove and take a bucket shower.

One of the challenges of not having a kitchen sink is doing dishes in the dark. We have a light in the back, but it's not sufficient to see whether a dish is truly clean, so we use the headlamp at night.



And of course, there's no washing machine, or rather, I am the washing machine.

This is one example of one way the people here deal with water. Each location presents its own challenges and opportunities. We've been to places where the people are much more disadvantaged in other ways, but have running water in a kitchen sink. Development of water projects is slow in coming to this mountainous country and often gets set back with each passing hurricane or tropical storm.