Water. Such a simple word for such an important resource.
In the US, I never woke up wondering if I would have enough
water to drink, to shower, or to wash my clothes. I would wake up, turn on the faucet where gushing water
fell onto my toothbrush. After brushing my teeth, I would wash off strawberries that would go into
my banana strawberry smoothie. Afterwords, I would look up at the shower head that sprayed
warm water on my face that made steam rise from my body like a volcano.
On a typical morning in Mozambique, the sun rays hit my face through my window and I run to my back
porch and I'm often left disappointed when there
is no agua, gushing from the faucet like it did in my mother's guest bathroom. At times, all of my buckets
of stored water are empty, except for speckles of dirt. I scratch my shoulder thinking,
"I have to teach school today and I need to brush my teeth and take a bath." Sometimes, I can
get enough water to wash up and take a bath from the filtered water that is for drinking and I cross my
fingers that we would have water later in the day or the following morning.
Yesterday morning,
Ana, a lady who helps my roommate and I with domestic chores, gently kicked an empty bucket and suggested
that she fetch water from the rio, river, about a mile
away. The lake in my town is a beautiful one where people scrub off their dead skin, clean their
stained dishes, and use it as if it were a giant commode. With no other choice, it was agreed to get water
from the lake. An hour later, Ana wobbles back to our house with a huge bucket on her head, filled
with cloudy agua from the lake. She washes our dishes with the water and returns to the lake
to fetch more. Last night, the lake water was filtered and then I cooked beans with it. It rarely gets
to the point where we have to get water from the lake but we felt that we had no other choice.
I leaped out of my bed to the sounds of water this morning. Grinning faces and buckets were lined up at our outdoor faucet like
liquid gold was falling into their buckets. I only got to fill one bucket before the water got shut off.
Here's a picture of one of our neighbors getting water from our house.
When it's rainy season, I'm happy because we put buckets outside that fill up with
drops from the sky. Rain leaves traces of starburst-colored
arches in the sky and smiles on faces. Here are some beautiful pictures that my friend Rafael Hernandez, another volunteer who happens to be an amazing photographer, took at his
site in Cabo Delgado of children playing in the rain:
Here's a link to his photoblog: http://rhexperience.wordpress.com/
Today, I bathe and drink in a different world than I did a year ago. Heck, I'm even excited when it rains. Not because I can listen to the sound of the patters on my window, but because
I can actually eat, drink, and wash with the agua. I learned that I don't need to shower for twenty minutes
to wash my body. In fact, I enough water to fill a two liter bottle of Coco Cola when I take a bath here. I am grateful for all I
had in the U.S. and that I anticipate to have again in about a year. But perhaps the thing that I'll be
the most thankful for is the abundance of, a small but important word, water.
