Water is Life...

Back about a year ago, when I was living with my host family in what I now think of as the large and bustling village of Molepolole, I was describing my life and bucket bathing to my sister back home in the states. When I got to the part in the bucket bathing description in which I mentioned having to lift the basin I’d just squat bathed over and dump it back into the bucket in which I’d hauled the water into the house back outside to dump it back into the yard, I remember exclaiming, “I would so rather have indoor plumbing than electricity.” Although my arms came to be amazing during that period of my life, the statement still stands.

My sister sounded a bit incredulous about this, (“How will you watch movies on your laptop without electricity?”) and I can’t wait until she gets to experience life in Seronga (My mom, Karly and Paul are coming in October!!!!). I have been lucky enough in my placement in Seronga to have indeed gotten water and even a little electricity. I have a solar panel that I can use to charge everything in my house during the day and then selectively watch a movie or have music at night. I have water coming into my house for a sink, a toilet, and a bathtub with a pseudo solar shower.

I have all this luxury… When there is sun. Luckily Botswana gets something like 300+ days of sun in the year. It’s those few overcast ones that begin to make life difficult.

Strangely enough, if it is overcast or worse yet raining in the village I won’t have water. How can having rain, which seems like free water from the heavens mean you won’t have water, you ask.

I realize it doesn’t seem to make sense. As with most things here it’s a bit of a convoluted story.

In Seronga, all of our water comes from a pump house, located between 15-20 kilometers outside Seronga near the settlement of Teekae. The water is pumped into great big holding tanks high above the villages. There are standpipes and taps throughout the village through which to access the water. The holding tanks are rarely cleaned, which leads to an interesting smell or crazy spider webby sort of slime or sediment in the water depending on the season and temperature. You get used to it.

I’ve realized, much to my recent houseguest’s (who had been a PCV in Kenya) dismay, that I when there is water I will leave it running a while after I need to just to hear that it is there. When the water is out I will leave the tap open just so I can hear the occasional hissing that means the water might be on its way. I keep buckets and jugs full of water at all times. I rejoice in the sound of my toilet running. To say I’ve developed a bit of an obsession with water is an understatement.

So in Seronga, there is one man whose job it is to make sure the pump has oil and fuel (which he apparently sometimes spills down the pump hole, causing my water to have a beautiful oily shimmer) in order to make sure the holding tanks are full. This man does not have a vehicle. So he relies on calling all the government offices in the village to find out when someone is going out that way, or who has enough petrol to take him to Teekae. With his cell phone.

Now what can cell phones possibly have to do with sunshine and water? Or the price of rice in China?

Wait for it.

In Seronga we have two cell phone companies that we can use. The older of the two, and the one most people in Seronga use, is Mascom. It’s been here longer and is slightly cheaper than its more newly introduced competitor, Orange. (I have noticed lately that more people have begun to get Orange Sim cards as well, which they switch out on an unpredictably based schedule with their Mascom sim card, using the same phone. So you never know which number people will have in their phone and have to waste money trying to text or call both numbers in order to get a hold of someone. Charming.) Orange (which I have because it can text the states, and is more reliable in Seronga) is set up to operate their cell tower off the police generator, which is nearly always working. Mascom came to Seronga a while back, and put up their tower powered by a solar panel and battery, which is getting a bit old. This means that people using Mascom can expect that they won’t have service after about 10 at night or before 10 in the morning, the times during which the solar battery is dead.

When is the other time a solar battery might be dead- you wonder. Yup that’s right, when it’s overcast. So anywhere between a few hours and a day of when it becomes overcast I can generally expect we’ll lose water. It seems a bit difficult for the pump guy to actually have to walk between the government agencies (and in his defense they are a bit sprawled out from end to end-not a lot in Seronga is centrally located). Or if it’s the end of the month (payday) and the pump guy is too busy partying to remember to get out to fuel the pump.

Seronga is not unique in this water problem by any means. In other villages in Botswana the water comes from centralized treatment plants or pump stations. In the delta, in villages “that side” (the western shore of the delta) also have their water coming to them from centralized treatment plants, or sometimes piped directly from the river. The villages to the south western end tend to be a quite a ways from the actual river, or even the floodplain. They would not have the luxury of being able to walk to the delta to fetch water. Places like the Etshas and Gumare have problems when the flood comes because it can flood out the pumping stations. They have problems when the flood recedes because elephants, the brilliant creatures that they are, can somehow find where the water pipes are under the ground and smash them in order to get the water out without having to travel any further into the delta. As the river always seems to be flooding or receding, (thus the nature of the word “delta” or the nickname of the place as “the swamps”) these villages are nearly constantly in a problem with water.

The village of Seronga is lucky because most of the inhabitants live within a somewhat reasonable distance of the floodplain or even the river, which has water all year round. They can fetch water and carry it on a bucket on their head for everything they need in a day.

(Pause to let you think about fetching a hauling all the water you’d need for a day-drinking, bathing, cleaning, cooking- a kilometer or so uphill from the river to your house, on your head. Now add your children and spouse into that picture. Then remember that you must be boiling the water that you and everyone in the family plan to drink over an open fire to sanitize- as many people and cattle bathe in, wash clothes in, and use the delta as a toilet. You have to find and haul the firewood as well. Add HIV to the mix, attacking your body and ARV’s making you occasionally nauseous, sick or weak. Do you have livestock or a garden that needs to be watered to provide food at the very least and a bit of side income- or sometimes the only income into your household? Ladies and gentlemen this is the burden of an African woman, and it’s how some of them live their lives every day. I’ve got it bloody easy.)

For those of us that are even luckier, there’s a thing called a Jo-Jo. In reality, despite these crazy water conditions I usually still do have water; I just have to haul it from across the yard. It’s a pain in the ass. (I still thank my lucky stars for this as I know many PCV’s even in this country who don’t have indoor plumbing, a Jo-Jo or both) A Jo-Jo is a big green water tank with holes in the top to be filled with either rain water from gutters (which can get gross because of all the leaves that also fall into gutters, as well as bugs and spiders that get into the tanks) or a hose when the water is working. When there’s no water coming through the standpipes, this option becomes a helluva lot more appealing. As I boil and filter all of my drinking water anyways, this isn’t the end of the world. Many of the government houses in most of the villages have Jo-Jos, and quite frankly, the villagers have lived with this problem their entire lives, and have taught me tricks too numerous to count of how to deal with not having water.

I admit that this situation is light years ahead of many of the water situations in African nations, and again, that I’ve got it easy by many village standards. As I write this, the water is out again, the sun is bright as ever (which is lucky because my solar battery is powering my laptop in my hut as I write) for reasons mysterious to me. I guess it’s part of the magic and mystery of Africa that try as I might, I will never fully understand it. Which can be a beautiful thing. And if I had a glass of water, I’d drink to that;-)


Post Script: by the time I'm posting this entry it's been several days straight without water. I've heard that the pump itself is broken and that the repairmen went back to Gumare. I don't even know what that means. I find my mood is so dependent on water. Have a tall cold clean glass from your tap for me, no matter how gross you think that is and thank your lucky stars for it.