Village Vignettes 3: Water

Water is something we so easily take for granted. Living in southern Ontario, with the Great Lakes all around, getting good fresh water is usually not a problem. Sure, there are scares sometimes, like the PCBs that got into the Smithville water supply in the 1980s, worries about lead pipes in old buildings, and the Walkerton crisis of a few years ago. But those are the exception rather than the rule. Water generally comes out of the tap, ready to drink, and we don’t think much of how it got there.

When you live in a village, though, water doesn’t come so easily. It certainly doesn’t come out of a tap in the kitchen in seemingly unlimited quantities.

When you want drinking water, you usually have to hike to get it. And as sure as the law of gravity, that hike is going to involve a steep slope (often muddy and very slippery) to get you down to the water. Our water source was a spring about 700 metres away from our house. As is quite typical with a spring, someone put a pipe into the spring to bring the water to a somewhat more convenient location (not quite as convenient as everyone’s house, unfortunately).

Our water source – the water comes out of the ground between
the roots of that big tree in the top-centre of the picture.
Notice the nice muddy path at right.

Filling water containers.

Every family has a collection of used pop bottles that become the family water transport system. It is traditionally the task of women to get water, and it is unbelievable to see how much water they carry up those steep muddy paths and back home. It’s not uncommon to see a woman carrying 20 L worth of water in water bottles in a string bag on her back (hanging from her forehead), and balancing another 15 L in pots stacked on top of each other on top of her head.

Families that are committed Christians don’t follow all the old traditions anymore. They realize that it’s good if a man helps his wife out with the household chores, especially if he would otherwise just be sitting around doing nothing anyway. We were blessed to be living with a pastor’s family. Quite often, some of the family members (including the male members!) would go out to the spring and get some for us – in addition to water for their own family.

I would also fill up a few bottles at the spring every day when I went to shower there. This was a lot of fun, actually, because a few children would always follow me. They would carry some of my water for me, and I would tell them stories that I had heard as a kid; sometimes they would ask me to tell the same story two or three times on the walk back home. The Three Little Pigs and Rikki Tikki Tembo quickly became their favourites.

The cleanness of drinking water is always an issue to be aware of. Many people have to boil their drinking water, or purify it in some other way. Thankfully, since we got our water from a spring, we didn’t have to worry about that; we could drink it straight from the source. And since firewood is also a commodity not to be taken for granted, it was nice not to have to “waste” firewood just on boiling water.

Water tank

The days of walking down that steep muddy path may soon be over. Our village has received a great big water tank, installed by an NGO that has been quite active with various projects in the village. The tank is supposed to receive water from a pump down the mountain; however, the pump they put in isn’t powerful enough to bring the water up to the tank. They are working on it, and hope to have things fixed up by next year.

One of the guys took me down the mountain to see the source for this tank. Water is taken from a stream (or spring, I’m not sure) and is piped into this holding tank:

 

The pipe on the left of that tank goes on to the pump:

 This is a ram pump, which requires no electricity at all, and is therefore very practical for the village setting. Water comes into the pump through the 100 mm pipe at the top right. This volume of water provides enough force to operate the diaphragm of the pump. Of course, that cannot provide enough power to pump a 100 mm pipe’s worth of water, but it does give enough force to push water through a smaller pipe. The 40 mm pipe that comes out on the left side of the pump heads up the mountain, and hopefully, with a bit of help from a windmill or another pump, will bring water all the way up to Waliyaksor sometime in 2012.