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