Ok so a few months back I was asked to write about my water
situation since I don’t have running water. I know crazy right.
Honestly, I don’t even notice. (except when my buckets are empty and I
don’t have a magical faucet that is always ready to dispense way more water
than I need.) And well I figured
I’d get around to that so H2o is what’s happening in this post.
Instead of a sugar daddy I have a water mama. She brings me 60 liters of water at a
time and the going rate for someone to deliver is 30 bob (a little more than 30
cents.) She works at the school
near my house, which is convenient for me to tell her when I need more water when
school is in session. However,
when school is on break sometimes I have to go looking for her and sometimes to
no avail. So I have to be even
more careful with my water usage. A
couple months ago there was a school strike making it difficult to find her and
I had to choose between bathing or washing dishes. This is a regular occurrence. Definitely not an issue I ever had to think about in the
States. Most weeks I can get by
with 60 liters of water. And this
is for drinking, bathing, cooking, cleaning, washing my hands, and doing
laundry. The UN states that every
person needs 20 liters of water a day.
That would be 140 a week.
So I am doing more than my part to conserve.
And now it is picture time.
This is where I store my water.
This is how I do my laundry.
After I do laundry I use that water to mop. When I first got to Kenya I couldn’t do laundry without getting bloody knuckles. Those days are long in the past. Jeans and sheets are let’s just say a pain to wash. I will never again complain about having to switch my clothes from the washing MACHINE to the DRYER. Ahhh fresh warm clothes from the dryer.
Getting water from the pump.
Every time I go to the well or any water source I always get
laughed at. Like hey look at this
white girl and she can’t even carry 20 liters on her head. Seriously I have had this conversation
a thousand and ten times of why I can’t carry 20 liters on my head. They don’t understand that because I
haven’t been doing this since I was 3 that it will snap my neck. Because I can’t perform this task they
think I’m weak and they find it quite amusing. It really is quite impressive though, sometimes I will
see a mama with 20 liters on her head and then carrying 10 liters. The water pumps are crazy busy in the
mornings and when the sun is going down.
There is almost always a line to get water during those times since it’s
not as hot.
Up until 5 months ago I was using PUR packets to purify my
water. That consisted of dumping
chemicals in my water, stirring 5 minutes, waiting another 5, then using a
funnel and handkerchief to keep out all the dirt and gunk, then waiting another
20 minutes till I could drink it.
See for yourself this is what was pulled out of my water.
Now I use a lifestraw.
You dump water in and let it filter down and drip into a bottle and it
is ready for drinking… so much easier and much less time and effort. The only
thing is it takes about 7 minutes to fill a liter so I always start doing
something else around the house and forget about it only to come back to water
on my floor. Which is a complete
waste. So that means its time to
mop. I’ve gotten better about how
much water I pour in and have perfect pours these days. Yeah me!
Sometimes when it rains really hard I’ll take my buckets and
set them under the edge of my roof to catch water and it’s free! The short rainy season is back. Thank goodness. Rain makes it so much easier for me to
have access to water. I was able
to catch 100 liters today after work.
My dishes and I will both be clean this week!
Bless the rains down in Africa.
Ya, that pretty much sums up water for me.
wow...i feel SO lucky to have running water here in ukraine. i might still take bucket baths but i can't imagine the effort of having to port your own water! thanks for sharing : )
ReplyDeletekristen
pcv ukraine
You remind me of home! I lived more years in Africa than I have lived in the USA. So carrying in water from the rain barrel. Sending all of my kids out with buckets to catch rainwater during a miraculous rain during dry season when our rain barrels were empty. We lived through 2 droughts during which our rain barrels went dry. I also strained it by putting a cotton dish towel on to the tap with a rubber band but did not treat it.
ReplyDeleteRe-using bath water --Yep! I sang "Bailing, bailing, over the bounding sea!" while I bailed it out of the bathtub. (We heated water on the stove and put it into a camper's shower bag to hang over the bathtub.) I re-used it to flush the toilet (only for #2) and water my vegetable garden. Washed my clothes in a bucket using a clean toilet plunger to agitate the clothes and save my knuckles. Had Kris and Kyle twist their jeans and towels one at each end to get excess water out. I would not have traded these experiences for anything for they made me appreciate the hard work that my African sisters did daily. Many of them had to walk up to an hour one way to get water which they carried back home on their heads twice a day.
Linda
L