Pages

Friday, December 21, 2012

Metsi Mathata

If there is one thing that you don't take for granted living in Botswana, it's water. There is no happier sound than the gurgle and sputter of your toilet, as this means water is trickling back through the pipes.

That said, my water has been off for 13 days. Eishe.

A couple of days without water, no problem. Etsha 13 and I can handle that. We all have our storage buckets, there are the scattered jojos (big water barrels), and for some parts of the year, the flood plane isn't all too far of a walk. But when, like over the past week or so, it hasn't been raining much, meaning empty jojos, the floods are about as low as they are going to get, and your water stores have been on low for the past 8 days... daily life gets a bit more complicated.

Lucky for me, I can leave Etsha 13 with relative ease. I can utilize the ambulance and friends to bring clean water up or down from me or bathe and wash the necessities at friends' places. I also have an overabundance of water storage containers thanks to my American visitors and their aversion to my salty tap water. Not everyone in my village is as privileged, and even if you know that it's unsafe to drink water from the flood planes or straight from the jojos, these things fall to the wayside if you're dehydrated and running out of options for safe drinking water... this is the sort of shit that leads to babies dying of diarrhea. So absurdly avoidable; this same problem happened with the water pump a few weeks earlier.  Coupled with the horrific shootings in Clackamas, OR and Connecticut, this has been a rough week.

No comments:

Post a Comment