Just.....water

8/10/10

Water/nsuo/nnyun/aqua/wasser

There we are.  “Water” in every language I know.  English/Twi/Likpakpaln/Spanish/German.  We all know so much relies on this single element; so much of life and activity revolves around this simple liquid.  Take a moment and think about your daily interactions with water.  No, really.  Do it.  I’m not talking about how much your body relies on it, but how you interact with water.  How do you use it?  How do you think about it?  When do you think about it?  What do you use it for?  How much do you use?  Do you use different kinds of water for different tasks?  Are there different kinds of water?  Do you like the way it tastes, feels?  Is it comforting, refreshing, dangerous?  How do you use water to interact with other people?  Do you?  Where does it come from before your body touches it?  Where does it go when you are finished with it?  How does it get from one place to the other?  How do we as a civilization get it from one place to the other?  How does it get to your house?  My host father asked how we get water up to the top of very tall buildings.  Do you know?

In a place where your water does not come from the lift of a tap or the twist of a knob, your interactions with water completely change.  They have to.  Water now becomes a major task to acquire and use.  As a Health/Water and Sanitation volunteer, water (like shit in the previous post) becomes a major part of my work.  For weeks I have been learning about the different water systems in place and observing the different interactions around water.  The infrastructure for running water does not yet exist for all places in Ghana, in fact, it is rare to have a house with running water.  Most households possess several large water barrels where the water is stored and accessed.  Here, in Anyinasin, there are three sources of water—the rain, the river (more like a large stream), and the borehole.  Each is collected at different times and used for different tasks and thought of differently.  When it rains (which it hasn’t done very much recently), the barrels are placed in strategic areas in the compound where the water runs off the roof.  It is fairly clean if you allow the water to run off for five or ten minutes to let the rain wash off all the dust, dirt, and lizard poop.  And…rain water is free.  Collecting from the river is also free, and you can guess how clean and healthy that can be to use.  Most people will also tell you it has a different taste from the other waters, and is usually preferred.  “It tastes sweet.”  Borehole water is a different matter.  A borehole is essentially a simple mechanized well.  Hand-dug wells still exist in Ghana, but many have been upgraded to boreholes.  A hole is drilled deep into the earth where the ground water is clear and (mostly) clean.  The top of the hole has a metal hand pump that must be, well, pumped any time one wants to access the water.  Collecting water from the boreholes tend to cost money because there has to be a fund for when parts break (which they inevitably do) and someone has to be paid to fix it.  Development agencies have finally realized that they can’t just come in and build boreholes and expect people to use them and upkeep them without education and funds.  (Okay really, I’m going to write that post on sustainability one of these days.)  Especially when the taste of river water is preferred. 

We use this water for everything.  There are three cups in the house that are used for dipping into the barrel to get water.  We use these to fill bucket for bathing and laundry, for cooking, for hand washing, and whatever else comes up.  The river water will be used mostly for dishwashing or other kinds of washing, or my host father may bathe with it after he comes back from the farm.  Water is moved from pumps to buckets, to barrels, to buckets, to dishes, to body, to clothes, etc.  It’s amazing how much less water everything takes.  I really don’t need more than a bucket of water to get clean, even if I wash my hair.  Clothes don’t need nearly the amount of water that machines use either.  In fact, I think my host mother has been able to get some of my clothes cleaner than they have been in many many machine washes.  It’s almost like the further and further we get from the source and act of acquiring such basic essentials, the more we forget how little of it we actually need.

Okay, so I’ve briefly described the sources we can get water from when we need it, so how do we get it, and what do we do after we get it?  So, the water barrels in my host family’s house are getting low.  My little sisters get a couple of buckets and head to either the river or the borehole.  Usually the river water is contained in one barrel and filled first because the river is closer.  I, however, am not allowed (nor do I want to) ever use the river water, (both as a HWS volunteer and by Peace Corps itself), so the barrel by my room and usually another one, is only for borehole water.   If the barrels are low, this is usually the first task of the morning.  So, I go with Prinsla and Adua (ages 8 and 10 respectively) to the borehole with the buckets.  It’s a short walk, really, down the path and across the road to the borehole pump.  Morning is water collection time, so there are already several women and children there, with the occasional man or boy.  Everyone is standing around waiting their turn amidst the strewn buckets and containers, the queue somehow worked out in their heads.  The pump has a large pipe faucet and the pump is a lever that is pulled up and down like one of those railroad carts from old Mickey Mouse cartoons.  One container is left underneath the faucet as a catch all as other containers are filled and/or poured into other containers.  When your bucket is filled, you put a small rolled cloth on your head arranged like a bird’s nest and with the help of another person, the bucket goes on your head and off you go.  Once you have walked back to the house to empty the bucket into the waiting barrel, you stand a foot or less away from it, and without taking the bucket from your head, bend your body in such a way that you pour the water from the bucket on your head into the barrel.  I have watched Adua do this many times without spilling a drop.

So, last week, I woke up to water being poured in the barrel.  I got up and got dressed and walked out of my room as the girls were ready to go for another round.  On a whim, I thought—I’ll go too.  And though it struck them as weird, they weren’t about to turn it down.  I wasn’t going to collect any, well, because I didn’t want to spill it on the way back, so I amused them and the rest of the town by trying to balance the empty bucket on my head.  Several mornings ago, the same scenario occurred, but this time, my host mother had to go too because we needed more water than just what the girls could carry.  So, with her encouragement and the amusement of the other women at the borehole, I risked the spillage.  Mame filled the bucket and, after a couple tries, placed it on my head.  I had a death grip on the rim of the bucket so I didn’t have to worry about balancing and with my old marching band skills called out of long retirement to a completely unforeseen situation, only managed to spill half of it down the front of me on the ten minute walk back.  Then, the best part of all, I get to pour it into the barrel from the top of my head.  Well, needless to say, I did spill a drop—several million in fact.  But at least most of the bucket got in the barrel!