Water Stressing

El Padre carrying water home from the well as neighbors
get a kick out of it!

We are into the hot and dry season here and now we know more fully what life is like without much water. Lately the best case scenario is when our water starts coming out of the faucet at about 10:30pm. But this water is only a drop to a trickle, so for filling our buckets, it will easily take us till 12:30 in the morning or so to fill just three buckets of water! Then that’s all we can expect to come out of the pipes till the next night. It’s such a small flow as well that it doesn’t make it up to the top of our house where the water storage tank is waiting to be used in such situations… Knowing that this routine may become even worse for the next two months of the hot season is quite a depressing outlook for us.

Last Sunday morning water came out of the faucet for our children to wash their hands and they were so excited that they ran to tell us about it. They had not seen running water for days.

We had a conversation with a friend who told us that he had never lived in a house that had problems with water. Later on he said that, at each of his houses, water was always running by 10pm – a little different understanding of what constitutes a water problem than what we were expecting...

To add to our stress, we have a guard and part time house helper who come into the house to work, so we don't have 'control' over how much water is used. As a result, we’ve had to go to the well to bring water to our house sometimes. We are grateful that the well is close by, although it almost always has a line of donkey carts stacked with gasoline containers, waiting to fill and bring to neighbors in other parts of our area. As El Padre remarked, “I found myself going to the well around noon, but it wasn’t because of my reputation, just that I didn’t want to spend so much time waiting in line!”