All About Agua!

I have never thought about water as much as I do here. I tried to think about it, taking lots of baths and turning the water off as I brush my teeth, but we are so distant from any kind of water issue in Seattle, I didn’t understand what it meant to conserve water. Here, like many parts of the world, water is not only a problem, it is the problem. Rio Artibonito, the natural border between Haiti and Dominican Republic, is our water source in Pedro Santana. There is an aqueduct that pumps water from the river up to a tank which then distributes the water evenly between three towns. Water arrives usually every third day for three or four hours. At this time, the whole town is filling large and small buckets, washing clothes, mopping floors, and bathing.

A hose is useful for filling the large buckets but my style is carrying small buckets back and forth to fill the large ones. Some times the water arrives clear, which becomes the talk of the town, and others it is really brown (nicknamed “chocolate milk”). The dark water is the result of the erosion after it rains amplified by the complete deforestation in Haiti and in much of this side. Occasionally, the river is so muddy, water can’t go through the aqueduct and households dry up. People bathe and eat at friends houses that have these huge tanks for water storage. This past weekend, I washed my clothes at a neighbor’s house and brought some water home in buckets for the bare necessities.

My house is like most in town in that it has a bathroom with a toilet and a cement area with a drain to bathe, and a sink, as well as a sink in the kitchen. Water, however, only arrives to a faucet in the back yard. Because there is no running water in the houses, everything functions with the help of buckets. We have two large buckets that stay outside; one is for bathroom use and the other for kitchen use. We also use two five-gallon buckets, one for bathing with a bowl and the other to wash dishes, and one two gallon bucket for throwing water down the toilet (the alternative flush) and for mopping our cement floors.

Many people throw water and soap on the floor like a flood which I assume is supposed to get it good and clean and also to cool down the house. I exempt myself from this activity because my two roommates and I lack furniture and consequently practice floor piling organization. For drinking, we buy water for about 86 cents per carboy. It is better and cheaper to have a filter. A water filter project interests me as many people here drink the river water to save money making parasites one of the most common health problems in town.

Right now, we are in the midst of the rainy season, a time I know I will miss dearly. We all hope for afternoon the sky to change from 100 degrees clear blue to dark clouds with a cool wind. Everyone bustles around shutting windows, stashing things like clothes and chairs inside and strategically placing every bucket to catch the rainwater from their roofs. We empty all the buckets to take advantage of the clean rainwater. I change into shorts and a T-shirt and get ready to run. Then it pours with the intensity of a high pressure shower. I like to go out with a bunch of boys who run around in the neighborhoods, jumping in the rivers that run down the streets and hitting up the good gutter from the roof of the town government building. They think my presence is hilarious and I’m sure if I saw myself yelling in Spanish and splashing Dominican junior high boys, it would look like a joke. I’ll take a running club anywhere I can get it and I like to lie and say that I, like all American girls, never get tired.

When I get home, I strip down to my skivvies and take a wonderful shower in the rain. I hope I will never forget to appreciate water coming from above. I am well accustomed to the bucket bath but a constant flow down on my body still feels like a birthday present. After my long clean shower in the rain, I also get the gift of feeling a little cold. Then, I go with my umbrella to teach my English class and no one shows up. Nothing normal happens when it rains. The kids go home from school early, meetings are canceled (informally as no one is notified, everyone just knows), and even social lives are put on hold to sit in the house with family. I admit that it is kind of nice to sit in the house and read, either by electricity or flashlight if the power is out.

The days after hard rains are important planting times in the fields. In a community dependent on subsistence agriculture, a good rainy season means a good harvest and the possibility to make money by selling excess crops. Unlike higher technology agriculture, there is no insurance of an irrigation system. The farmers here are totally dependent on the completely undependable weather.

There are aqueducts serving many of the rural communities in this region built sometimes by the government but more frequently by foreign aid. Some communities don’t have an aqueduct but are able to collect water from a nearby river or stream. Still, there are many people without easy access to water and even more with no potable water. No access to potable water goes hand in hand with children’s protruding stomachs, impossible roads, and no easy access to healthcare. Here, water is everything.

In much of the developed world, it goes almost unnoticed. We drink it from the faucet, cook with it, take showers, use washing machines and complain when it rains. On the scale of global water issues, we are fortunate here. The worldwide water crisis is almost too immense to think about. I have no advice about how to take it in or an easy way to change your lifestyle. The more time I spend here as a community-based development volunteer, the more I think effective development work is not with small projects. What really facilitates development is infrastructural improvements. People need roads. When vehicles can access a community, they can build aqueducts and clinics. Without water, no one can produce anything to sell and without roads no one will come to buy the products. Infrastructural development is essential for economic progression.

I wrote a final paragraph that resembles a guilt trip so I will end here. It is my personal belief that we, as lucky ducks, have some sort of responsibility to at least acknowledge the problems of the world.