Without Water

The water tank behind our house

A couple years back I watched a documentary called “A world without water.” It’s a must see about places in the world where there are great water shortages, not caused by desertification or draught but rather the privatization of potable water in places where the people can’t afford to buy it. The documentary interviews many victims including a rural African farming family who had groundwater for generations before Coca-Cola moved a factory in next door and sucked it out from under them for free.

It’s a difficult issue because if you charge people for water they presumably value it more and waste less but what do you do when people can’t afford it?

Being from a middle class, great-lakes-state family, I could not even get close to relating to the people I saw in the documentary. The challenges facing these people were nothing I had ever imagined doing; walking miles and hauling water, not being able to eat because it doesn’t rain on the crops, etc. But this is not just a problem for rural people of color living on poor continents. Part of the documentary highlights some of the approximately 40,000 families living in Detroit homes without running water. What we think of as “third world” conditions within our own city.
Now I understand a little bit more... As I wrote about before, here in this tiny piece of the rural Dominican Republic we are fortunate to have an aqueduct that brings us safe, clean water from the protected national park to our sinks and showers. Last Sunday something only a little short of a tragedy occurred when one of the main pipes broke near the source. It took the man in charge of the aqueduct and all of the plumbers away from their families for the entire Sunday. I work with these men a lot and I know how hard they work every other day of the week so I felt bad already, but I felt even worse the next day when the water still hadn’t showed up. In my community we receive water two days a week, Monday and Friday. So on these days we do laundry (if there’s electricity), wash the floors and fill the tanks and barrels to last us the next four days until it shows up again. Although we have to ration the water a bit more, it’s not so bad if it doesn’t show up Monday as long as it comes Friday. Some communities only receive water one day a week or once every two weeks. These are the people that suffer when there’s no water on their day. Monday there was no water and Friday it didn’t come either. At this point there was no water for drinking, the floors were incredibly dirty and the only water left in the barrel (for bathing of course) was the bottom 10th that if you move too much you stir up the dirt and algae that have settled on the bottom.

“And when this is gone what happens?” I had to ask out loud because I had never considered the problem before in my life. (We live so privileged, so many of us, that we can’t tell you where a source of clean water is outside of our homes. We live so environmentally unconscious that for the majority of us there isn’t a source clean enough to drink anywhere near our homes.) My brother pointed in the direction of the small river that runs behind the adjacent properties. “Oh yeah,” I thought, “now I remember, the river that just 10 years ago they were bathing, washing and drinking out of.” It doesn’t make my top ten list of bodies of water out of which I’d like to drink but it certainly could be worse. It didn’t turn out to be necessary but the experience made me think.

Like this whole Peace Corps experience it is just making me even more flexible and grateful. I can just imagine the conversation with the landlord of my next apartment… “It has running water and I can turn the lights on whenever I want? You mean 24 hours a day the refrigerator will be working? Wow that’s great, I’ll take it.”


My "bathroom" after a windy evening.
The scene outside is the main road in front of my house.