WAter Sanitation and Hygiene

We haven’t had electricity or water for the better part of this week. I get by hooking up the generator for a few hours to charge my computer (when we have enough fuel for the generator), and we hired someone to bring us buckets of water from the nearby Yei River. The boy who works here, climbed to the top of my bathroom’s water tower and poured in the water, jerrycan by jerrycan. It took about 20 minutes or so—incidentally, about the amount of time it took me to use most of that water in an attempt to clean the bathroom and shower. Why was I so horribly inconsiderate? Because of the following conversation with our South Sudan country director while we were in the US together:

Someone, maybe Natalie: But you will have showers with running water.

Mark: Well kind of. The water has to be carried up by someone.

Jefferys: Oh no, we have a pump.

There may have been more to that conversation, which clarified that the water that is carried up to the tower is from that pump, but I had heard what I thought I needed to know, and so I didn’t pay attention to the rest of the exchange.  And that came back to bite me when I had no water in my tank for 3 days. After that, everyone lost water, when the solar panel pumping the central water from the town of Mundri to various pumps around the area, was apparently stolen by some enterprising person. Almost a week later, we are still buying water, but I have been very frugal with the water in my shower. I have also had the foresight to put out all my buckets and receptacles every time it rains to catch as much water as I can. I have then used that water for washing as well. I also put a bucket in the shower with me to catch whatever water falls in the moments I have the shower on while rinsing off soap. That’s when I noticed that the water in the bucket is actually the same color as the water in the Yei River. Coming out of the shower it looks nice and water-ish. In the bucket it returns to mud. I only brushed my teeth with it once or twice because I thought, “I’m probably going to get malaria since I decided not to take harsh medications long-term, so maybe I shouldn’t contract a parasite as well.”

(Author’s note: I’ve been writing things down off and on for this week, and I just

found out that I was right about the parasite. The other foreign ladies here who live in a compound not far from here and have internet that they graciously allow me to use, informed me that there is some weird parasite that I will probably contract from my river-water showers. Oh well. Too late to do anything about it now. But at least the visiting foreigners used up all my water and I got some more from a nearby pump.)

My neighbor Scott said, “Is it ironic that Neverthirst is having water problems?”