Water

“Nearly two million children a year die for want of clean water and proper sanitation while the world’s poor often pay more for their water than people in Britain or the United States,” according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in its annual Human Development Report.

It was only for two months, but while I lived in the rural village that Peace Corps placed us in for training, I lived a life based on efforts to get enough clean water. The water spigots placed in different parts of the village were dry for the better part of my stay of two months. The villagers generally didn’t know why the water was turned off. The best explanation we got was that people tampered with the pipes in order to access water to re-sell. Fellow trainees told me of hauling water for drinking, cooking, washing, etc. from the stream which ran through the village, a stream where stray cows, pigs, goats and kids wandered into. Luckily, my family rented a huge water receptacle which they filled when the spigots were turned on for the times when they were off. I never saw any villagers drinking a glass of water. Instead, they drank hot tea (which of course was boiled water) and CocaCola for a special treat. I spent a better part of the free time I had at the end of the day and until I went to bed:

· hauling water in buckets from the outside spigot into my house; and hoping the buckets were clean

· boiling water to have enough safe water to drink; which meant I had to find one of the two old metal-corroded kettles in the house and the electrical cord and adapter and hope that the family had paid for the pre-paid electricity to the home.

· taking a bucket bath; by dripping water over ones head while standing in a shallow bucket (you never get really clean, especially your hair)

· washing my clothes; by adding heated water from a kettle to a bucket and using the same dirty water for all my clothes

· watching my host family use last nights dish water to wash the morning’s dishes.

I won’t take clean water for granted ever again.

Statistics I can relate to:

• 40 billion hours are spent collecting water each year in sub-Saharan Africa—an entire working year for all the people in France.
• Many sub-Saharan Africans get less than 20 liters a day.
• The average American uses 150 liters per day with residents of Phoenix, Arizona using an average of 1,000 liters per day. Wow.