Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Water

Here in Mozambique, I’m known as ‘the crazy water lady.’ I don’t think it is worth the time/effort going into why, but in the end this is what’s important: I LOVE COLLECTING RAINWATER. In all honesty, what’s not to love about it? The water is a million times cleaner/tastier, it’s easy, it’s something to do, and it takes minimal effort!!! Anyway, when I returned from vacation all anyone would talk about was the ‘falta de agua’ (aka NO water) that exists in Monapo. Not good news. I assumed that maybe they were all overreacting and went about life. The problem with trying to live life without water is that it’s impossible. If you walked around our town during the day, you’d see tons of people meandering with empty buckets trying to find a place they could get water. There was one place in town that you could get water, but the waiting line during peak hours topped 12 hours! There were tons of people and hundreds of buckets all queued waiting for water from 1 spigot. The price of water soared. A 15 liter bucket normally costs 1 Metical to fill and at the height of our problem it cost 15 Meticais. People were taking showers less often (really not good) and resorted to drinking very questionable water. This led to a cholera outbreak. Once, when I was at school, I saw a lady walking around with a bucket filling it from puddles on the ground (really hoping is was not to drink, and I have no idea how there was a puddle on the ground =/). Monapo has not had any water come out of the ground since before Christmas, and there are rumors that this will continue through sometime in March. To make matters worse, we were also going through some sort of drought! Well, I’d like to say it is because of the million rain dances I did, but we finally started getting some great storms. Now, all of our buckets are OVERFLOWING with clean water almost to the point where Esther and I complain about the burden of too much water…almost.

1 comment:

  1. i knew our years of dance practice (maybe not rain dances... but never the less) would have come in handy... good job for saving Moz von!!! :) I read this and felt very naive as to how obsurd of a concept this was... how can you seriously be out of water?... but.. if it doesn't rain, i suppose that is exactly what happens! (who knew? :) take care von!!!!!!! I love you and miss you!!! keep writing your amazing adventures down.. i think u should publish all this stuff in a book when u'r done! (i'll look into it for you.. lol)

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