Water

Today is Tuesday, so I know that one of my fellow PCVs living in a peri-urban site (that is, in a community on the outskirts of a city) will at same point this day be filling buckets with water from the tap and pouring those buckets into a large trash can or other receptacle in advance of tomorrow, Wednesday, when his community doesn’t have any running water. This process will be repeated again on Friday in advance of Saturday when the water doesn’t run again. Another volunteer faces a similar schedule with water outages regularly occurring at least one day a week. I, however, don’t need to think specifically about days of the week – there are no water pipes in my community and no fresh water flowing even intermittently or weakly. I, on the other hand, get my water off a boat.

Chalupa with full water tanks

During our Peace Corps training the office staff interviewed each Trainee (as we were called during that time) to understand our needs and preferences in our future sites, weighing individual personalities with the limited number of sites that had been identified and approved for our work and safety. If my memory serves, during one of my interviews I was asked about experiences living and working in different cultures, adapting to the local routine, being flexible and patient working with colleagues. I was also asked if I had ever taken bucket baths, lived with limited water. Having done my fair share of hiking and camping during summer breaks, I felt not only prepared to live without running water, but excited by the notion of it and was thrilled when assigned to one of the few rural sites, one that had no running water. As I quickly learned though, soon after moving to my site, it’s one thing to go camping and jump into a cold mountain river to rinse off the sweat and dirt; it’s a completely other thing to lug massive jugs of water across town to be able to take a quick shower before school.

In my first several months on the island I would occasionally need to jump out of bed, grab plastic jugs, and run next door at a moment’s notice. The water man had come! An older gentleman routinely pulled up next door in a chalupita full of water jugs. Grabbing an overflowing jug or two he waded through the waist-high water to the shore, where all my neighbors were gathering with their empty jugs, jockeying for position to buy their water. Filling our four jugs, my host dad and I ran inside to dump them into a large plastic trash can and then went back out to refill. Rain, wind, doctor’s appointments, and other unexpected schedule changes meant that the water man might not come the next day or for several days. Best to fill up the tank while we had the chance.

The water man cometh!

On a few occasions he would not come for days. The water jugs without a drop in them and literally scraping the bottom of the large water barrel to be able to rinse off the night’s sweat before school, I’d have to walk down the street to buy a jug or two of water – often reserved for one of my neighbors who kindly gave me some of their water “quota” – and then precariously wheel the jugs back in an unwieldy wheelbarrow. (Once, with a particularly rickety wheelbarrow, I was convinced that I was going to lose control of the cart before getting home. I made it home, but then proceeded to lose about half my water to the street when unloading the jugs to bring into the house. My neighbors thought it was hilarious. I was not as enthused after such a laborious effort.)

My family’s water situation dramatically improved when my host mom’s brother moved in right next door and installed two large tanks for water (soon thereafter installing a third tank due to demand). Driving his big wooden chalupa into the city several times per week, he pumps the water into the tanks and then sells it by the jug to the neighborhood. Now when we need water I can hop next door any time of the day to fill up rather than depending on an unpredictable delivery schedule. For living in a town with no running water, it’s one of the better set ups for having access to bathing and drinking water.

Tanks full of water!!!!

Filling up the water tanks

Since we buy our water, water is an additional expense I have that which other PCVs don’t need to worry about. I estimate that I use about 2 jugs of water (20 liters in each jug) per day for bathing, cooking, washing dishes, drinking, and cleaning, with my weekly laundry adding a few more jugs as does the occasional visit from another PCV. At 500 pesos per jug, my monthly consumption comes out over $35,000 pesos (probably a bit higher than many people since I do my own laundry). I would estimate, quite conservatively, that a family of five people here pays at least $120,000 monthly for water consumption. Considering that the minimum wage in Colombia is around $660,000 pesos per month, a family in my community surviving on the minimum wage can expect to pay about 1/5 of their income on potable water.

Relaxing while some tanks fill

To keep me healthy the Peace Corps gave me a water filter which I use for almost all of my drinking water. Not knowing the source of the water that we buy, I take full advantage of the water filter and have to clean it a few times each month to get rid of the grime and particles that gather through the filtering process.

Here are a few more thoughts on water:

Bucket baths – That’s how I stay clean. Showers happen only when I stay at a friend’s house in the city or at a hostel or hotel. Showers are awesome. I can’t complain with bucket baths, but I have found that a limited amount of cold water isn’t the most effective for rinsing off all the dirt and sweat that accumulates daily. Hot showers are very rare and a marvel of modern technology.

Nice boat, but I'm more excited about the water it brought in

Rain – A good rain storm means we can move the trash can and some buckets to the edge of the roof and collect water instead of buying it. The general consensus here is that the first several hard rain storms are full of dirty, polluted water from nearby factories that is to be avoided; a few weeks into the full rainy season is a good time to start collecting water.

Flushing the toilet – No running water means no water coming into the toilet to flush down waste. (My family has an actual toilet, with an actual toilet seat, and a septic tank for the waste.) We take buckets down to the shore and fill them with brackish water which is then poured down the toilet to flush it.

Washing the dishes – We have a sink but it doesn’t have any piping (either to allow clean water in or dirty water out). Instead we use two buckets of water – one with soapy water for cleaning and one without soap for rinsing – to wash the dishes. It’s like camping except within a real kitchen. The dirty water from washing the dishes goes, um, out the window…

Carry your own water – I consider it a personal duty to get my own water and fill up tanks for bathing and to fill my water filter and I prefer to do it on my own rather than have my host family feel like they need to replenish the water tanks for my use. I also try to fill up the buckets used to flush the toilet with more water than I alone use. It doesn’t always happen that way, but I try to at least minimize the amount of effort my host family needs to expend for my water usage. Water, after all, is quite heavy.

A few more pesos – If you live up the hill, away from the filling stations down on the main street, filling up your water is truly a pain. For a few hundred more pesos you can pay someone in town to bring your water to your house for you.

The water horse – Whereas my end of town has a few filling stations that people manage for their income from water they bring to the island, the other end of town buys their water from a gentleman that pulls water around town in a horse-drawn cart. Houses leave their empty jugs out front to indicate they need water and pay him when he arrives. No money means no water.

Water Horse - Bringing Water to the Other End of Town

Alberca – Within my town there are about 50 or 60 albercas or albergas (depending on the accent of the person saying the word) – large, hexagonal concrete storage tanks traditionally used to store water. Most have decayed over the years owing to lack of usage, but there is one next to the school that is used to store the school’s water which is used primarily for cleaning – mopping the floors and flushing the toilets at the end of the school day. Every few months or so the school principal goes into Cartagena with a letter requesting a refill of the school’s water. When it runs out and there is a delay in refilling the school’s alberca, the school tends to have a less than pleasant odor. Remember how your high school bathrooms smelled? Now imagine what they would smell like without  running water. You get the point.

Water Brigade

 

Tips for Tourists - Revised

I recently updated a previous blog posting on Tips for Travelers coming to the Colombian Coast: http://therebytheshore.blogspot.com/2013/01/tips-for-tourists.html

After doing some recent traveling on the Coast in the company of other foreigners, I felt there were a few items which needed addition and/or revision. I'm planning to revise it again towards the end of this year; maybe by then I'll have had the time to fix some minor formatting issues which irk me!
Be well. - Mike

That Gringo Is Crazy!

That Gringo is Crazy!

Brief conversation with Fredi, a local buddy of mine:

Fredi: Everyone thinks you’re crazy, Mike.

Me: Uh, why?

Fredi: NOBODY DOES THAT!!! You must be crazy!

Me: Haha!

I had just gone for a nice jog through town, fist bumped or hand slapped approximately 300 kids, and capped it off by doing a running dive off the main pier into the bay. It was an exceptional start to a good day and one that raised the eyebrows of more than a few locals.



Launch Pad!!!

 _____

Living as a Peace Corps Volunteer is to inhabit a strange sphere of activity and thought, swimming in the confluence of multiple cultural waters of different depths and temperatures.

On one hand, you are living in a completely different culture, adapting to the customs and behaviors of the locals and trying to blend in or – at the very least – trying not to rock any boats. Mondongo (tripe) for dinner? Yes please! Being encouraged to try the very provocative local dance style in front of all your friends, host family and neighbors? Get out of your plastic chair and give it a shot!

 

Marvelous Mondongo (according to some)



On the other hand, you are a living, breathing specimen of American culture, a walking cultural ambassador and a potential source for illuminating the great secrets of the North. (Is it true that Americans only eat fast food and canned food? No, a lot of people eat fresh vegetables. Since all Americans know each other how come you can’t get Chris Brown down here to perform for us? Oh, Colombian student, the US is a larger place than you think.)

And outside of all of this, you are an individual. You have your own particular preferences, values, quirks, and characteristics that define you as an individual and provide myriad tensions and occasions of clashing with not only the new culture you live in, but the very own culture that you come from.

But I digress. The point is, when living abroad sometimes our individual actions will reflect our adopted host culture, sometimes the regional or national culture of our home, and sometimes just the particular traits developed (consciously or unconsciously) over our lifetimes. So it is understandable that some of the things we do might seem odd or nearly crazy by others we are living with.

Here are a few more things I do which either really confuse people in my community or make them think I’m at the very least quite strange:

Stand. When going to a person’s house for more than a minute or two or when in the teachers’ lounge at school, people offer me a chair to sit down. Sometimes I’m much more comfortable standing or simply feel like standing after having just been seated for a while. I more or less have to cave in and sit down at the risk of making my host or fellow teachers uncomfortable, even if I have already explained that I am quite content standing.

A recent conversation at school went like this:

Counterpart teacher: Mike, why don’t you sit down?

Me: I’m going to stand for a bit.

Counterpart: Are you uncomfortable standing?

Me: No, I’m perfectly fine.

Counterpart: Well, I’m uncomfortable with you standing. Please, sit down.

Me. Okay…

Walk around town. In no way do I consider my town large (in fact, it’s not even large enough to be called a proper “town”). Other than the main road – la calle principal – which can take 15 minutes to walk from one end to the other, there are a few short roads that run parallel and a path which extends off to other parts of the island. I live on one end of town and have no issue with walking to the other end of town to discuss a project or say Hi to a friend. After living here for over a year, people still express surprise when I walk to the other end of town. “It’s so far!” they exclaim. “No, not really. It only took me about 10 minutes from there to here” I respond. “But that’s so far! Why don’t you take a motorcycle?” “I like to walk. I find it enjoyable” I reply. “Wow. I would never walk all the way to the other end!” Which helps explain why nobody comes and visits me at home…

 

Perfect for an afternoon trot

Run. If walking around town is bad enough, running through town – especially during hot times of the day – initially had plenty of people thinking I was certifiably nuts. When I go for a nice jog I can do two or three laps around town; I can only assume this is much greater than the distance any of my neighbors walk over the course of a month.

Read books. In my value system, books are on the positive end of the spectrum. In some of its forms and styles I find the written word quite enjoyable. Locally, however, books fall into one of two categories: “The Bible” or “Something I am required to read for some class which I will skim with the hope that I can absorb enough information to get a passing grade because right now I really need to be playing soccer or drinking beer instead of this.” The notion of reading a book for fun is odd, if not unfathomable. On more than several occasions I have been reading a novel on the front porch and seen someone I know walk by, resulting in the following conversation:

Friend: Hey Mike! What are you studying?

Me: Oh, hi. I’m not studying, I’m just reading.

Friend: Ah, reading the bible. Good!

Me: No, not the bible. I’m reading a book.

Friend (Slows pace, and stops, a perplexed look coming across his face): Not the bible?

Me: No. It’s a novel by one of my favorite authors. I like to read.

Friend (Quite confused and unsure what to say): Oh… Okay… (Continues on his way)

 

Unidentified Artifacts from a Foreign Land



Drink coffee. Colombia, the land of great coffee, right? Not quite. Most locals here on the coast don’t drink coffee. If they do drink coffee, it will be in a plastic cup smaller than a Dixie cup and have a lot of sugar. I, on the other hand, need about 2 mugs of stovetop-brewed coffee in the morning to be able to function. That quantity of coffee will make any local absolutely insane, I have been told many times. Some of my neighbors and friends are amazed that I have not yet had a heart attack or lost my mind owing to my coffee consumption.



Where all good coffee drinkers eventually wind up...



There, By The Shore, A Putrid Beast

An Afternoon without Classes

Note: Although I am posting this story now, I actually wrote it one year ago after this event happened.

“Students will be released from school only as a last case scenario,” announced our school coordinator to a group of 12-odd gray-in-the-face docentes and scores of high school students one Wednesday early this spring. Exactly why releasing students would be considered the “last case scenario” in this situation left many of us with quizzical looks on our faces. Or maybe that appearance was merely discomfort owing to suppression of the gag reflex.

            Bachillerato (highschool) in my little Colombian town runs off a schedule prescribing school from 12:15 to 6:00 Monday through Friday. This schedule, however, serves more as a rough framework for our institution, changing weekly or even daily as determined by national holidays, community needs, power outages and – most commonly – rough water. Students can be released from school for many reasons: A death in the community; a plumbing issue resulting in the entire institution smelling like raw sewage; their last period teacher not coming to school that day; or all the teachers leaving early to catch a boat back to the city before the wind and waves create a precarious ride. So we were all bewildered that school would not be cancelled when a dead cow washed up on the shore right next to the school, covering the neighborhood with the foul stench of rotting flesh.

            With the start of the rainy season here on the Colombian coast, the Río Magdalena has begun its annual surges, pushing increased amounts of water up through a nearby canal and into the bay adjacent to my site. At farms further down the river inland, every now and then the occasional cow strays too close to the river, gets washed into the churning current by a rainstorm, drowns, and gets pushed out to the bay. Meeting the ocean currents, said water-logged, bobbing, bloated animal may sink to the floor of the bay, continue out further into the Caribbean, or – every now and then – wind up on the shore, as happened here a month ago, burning the lungs of anyone unfortunate enough to be downwind.

            For the uninitiated, the acrid stench of putrid animal not only singes your lungs, but burns itself into your olfactory memory, tightening the stomach at the simple remembrance. Once experienced, it cannot be forgotten. My first real taste of this horrible smell came several years ago living in Washington, D.C. when, during a particularly harsh winter night, a cat-sized city rat sought shelter from the bitter cold and followed the warmth of heat emanating from our clothes dryer after a load of laundry. Crawling horizontally into the slippery pipe, the rat plunged down the tube to the basement laundry room adjacent to my room, tumbling into the back chamber of the dryer. The cacophony of trapped animal ensued, with the rat throwing its body against the dryer chamber and scratching the metal until dying of hunger, thirst, or plain exhaustion several days later. (My landlords were not exactly the most responsive in attending to this situation.) Not long after the last scrape of the rat’s nails against the inside of the dryer, began the dispersion of a gaseous, chemical air that accompanies the breakdown of animal flesh, smothering any fresh oxygen in its path. I was harshly reminded of this event when I reported to school for the first class of the day at my site on this particular Wednesday, finding the students covering their faces with bandannas, handkerchiefs, their hands – anything that could provide even the slightest barrier to the reeking odor.

            “Por favor, profe” (“Please, teacher”) beseeched a student on the verge of jumping the school wall to run home and escape the smell, “if there’s ever a good reason to let us go early, this is it.” After about 40 minutes of ambling around the school yards with an increasingly uncomfortable and ill-looking body of staff and students looking on, the coordinator decided that instead of ending the day early and releasing the students, we would go to the main park while we waited for someone to address the dead cow. We all headed to the park, with groups of students sneaking off to head home not caring about the lack of formal permission to do so, some returning with sneakers and soccer balls, others finding a bench in the shade to talk, flirt, or simply sit alone for a while. Gradually more students trickled off, leaving only a handful of soccer players and the most conscientious students. Our group of teachers left any remaining students at the park to return to the school and arrange their daily return boat trip to the city.

            Back at school, most of the teachers gathered in the teachers’ lounge, enjoying a slight shift in the breeze that permitted easier breathing. Since no one else had yet responded to the situation in the meantime, two elderly men who live near the school were outside with large sticks pushing the enormous rancid cow into the water, against the afternoon current. I stayed outside the school to watch, along with one teacher whose professional motto may as well be “Any afternoon off of teaching is a win for the union.” With the cow now floating about 10 meters from the shore, the old men disappeared, showing up soon thereafter in a metal canoe and paddling toward the corpse. Reaching into the water to tie a length of rope around the hind legs of the beast, the canoe made its way to a Colombian Navy patrol ship that had finally responded to a call they received in the late morning when the cow first washed up on the shore of the town. After hitching the rope and its heavy, bovine cargo to the back of the patrol boat, the Navy officers headed toward the western edge of the island with the plan of cutting the cow loose in the open water to sink to the bottom of the bay or float out into the expansive, open sea.

The teachers’ return boat arrived and they boarded and headed to the city. The sun beginning to set to the west, shimmering off the water between the island and the mainland factories across the bay, I walked back along the dirt roads to my house. The afternoon having been filled not with classes but rather with the foul stench of rotten cow, I could find comfort at least in the fact that I still had class plans that would be useful the following Wednesday. And in the welcome site that my host mother was busy preparing fish for dinner, instead of the beef that I had previously seen in our freezer.

Several weeks ago I awoke to hear my neighbor yelling something to my host mom. A dead bull had washed up and gotten tangled in the grouping of mangroves that sits off the shore of our houses. Running, grabbing paddles for canoes came a group of high school students that live in the neighborhood. “Let’s get it loose and send it to the school” they yelled to each other. “Maybe we can get them to cancel classes for the day!”