Water

Tonight as I was walking back and forth between faucet and stressed perrenial and wishing for a thunderstorm, I checked my email and glanced at an e-newsletter from Church World Service.  The first headline was "CWS Responding in Drought-Stricken areas of Kenya."  Immediately I felt the weight of my watering containers as I imagined myself walking the dirt roads of a Kenyan village.  I felt the crunch of our straw-like grass and imagined  walking in solidarity with women from around the world, women who are gathering water for cooking dinner and washing clothes as I gather water to nourish the flowers and shrubs of our backyard.  It reminded me of something I had written a few years back when our water had to be shut off for a few hours...

It’s amazing how three hours of no access to running water can affect a life… at least for that moment in time.  So yes… at about “time to begin making dinner” time the other evening, I turned on the spigot to clean a frying pan when “wa-lah!”   No water.  Not even a drop.  We were given no prior knowledge to this invasive occurrence on our lives, so we had not been able to reserve a large pot or bucket of water as would be a typical response when one knows the lines are being turned off for this or that reason.  I looked around me…. two sippy cups, half-full of water; that’s it.  All of a sudden, a dozen little activities that we take for granted on a daily basis became very imperative.  Washing hands, flushing the toilet, quenching thirst, completing a load of soiled laundry, washing a dirty frying pan… all of these simple tasks had to be halted, and in turn my convenient way of living was brought into fresh perspective. 

            On many an occasion, I have told my four-year-old son to drink his water because “it is the best thing for you in the whole world” and to turn off the faucet when washing hands became a game because “water is the most important resource we have.”  Yet do I really know this from experience?  Is it really possible to believe this when running water is just an arm-length’s away for most of us?  The only times I have ever had to walk for water and carry it have been when I am camping, and usually “carrying” meant lugging our water container in the trunk of our Jeep back to our campsite. 

            Recently, I received the latest issue of my favorite magazine, A Common Place, which always serves to broaden my horizons and readjust my perspective.  I read about a Mozambique woman, Luiza Mamhoa—a widow, mother, and grandmother—who gets up at two in the morning to walk to the nearest well and returns at 9 a.m. with one 5-gallon jug of water to be rationed between the eleven people in her household.  Until a recent development in her village, people in her community had not enough water to plant or harvest any of their own crops during the seven-month dry season and so were dependent upon searching in the wild for any signs of food when their sources ran dry.  Luiza and countless other African women and men share similar stories as their continent’s rivers and streams continue to dry out due to causes such as global-warming and deforestation.   They understand how precious water truly is, and I doubt a fallen drop or a swallow-full is taken for granted. 

            I thought about Luiza and her delicate handling of water as I rationed what was inside my children’s sippy cups… a little to thicken our taco seasoning, several drops to wet a paper towel, a portion for brushing teeth, the rest for the children to drink.  I learned that I could “get by” with reusing a pan, wiping my sticky fingers on an already wet dish cloth, drinking the less-quenchable beverages in my refrigerator, and not flushing the toilet after every single use.

I suppose when push comes to shove, we are forced to use our creativity to “get by.”    Yet I wonder what else in my life do I use and discard carelessly?  What if I would use less so others could have more?  What really is enough?  The fact that I have the opportunity to call and pay for a plumber or to drive to the nearest convenience store for bottled water does not negate my responsibility to remember those who do not.