Who needs water? SO overrated…

9-3-10

For the past two weeks, our water system has been acting moody and stubborn – sometimes running and sometimes not.  It hasn’t been too bad until the last few days, when it hasn’t been running at all.  Needless to say, as a desert rat who drinks her full 8 glasses of water each day, this makes me pretty cranky.  As some of you may recall, even in the best of times, I only have one source of running water – a tap outside my house.  (You know, the one by the dangerously slippery cement driveway.)  I don’t even have a pila (a large cement basin that holds water).  So I’ve been experimenting with various ways of obtaining my water.

When our water was still running intermittently, I tried to boil as much as I could while we still had it.  Unfortunately, because I never anticipated a water shortage, I don’t actually have anything to store my water in, except a few water bottles.  Plus, it stopped running at all a few days ago – so I had to turn to new methods.  Since I like to be independent (sort of), I started using my guacal (bucket) to catch rain water.  (Despite the fact that our taps are dry, God has been hammering the greater Chalate area with an insulting amount of rain, in what can only be described as a galling display of irony.  Thanks buddy.)  I’ve discovered this method has some drawbacks.  As it turns out, rainwater here isn’t the cleanest water around, and notwithstanding the filtering and the boiling and the filtering again, my drinking water has some very disturbing little particles floating in it.  Plus, I only have one smallish guacal to catch water in, making this less than the most efficient method of obtaining water.  Finally, I came to the old standby method: making a lot of trips over to my host family’s house to wash dishes, vegetables, and myself, since they have a big pila to hold water.

Yesterday, I finally admitted that I absolutely couldn’t go any longer without washing clothes.  I’d been putting it off, because rinsing the soap out of clothing that you’ve just hand washed takes a prodigious amount of water, and I felt bad about using so much of my host family’s.  But I was running out of things to wear, so I went over in the morning to put my clothes into a guacal filled with water and Rinso (a detergent to get the mildew jungle-stink out).  But when I came back a few hours later, Angelita just look at me sadly and, “No hay agua para lavar.”  There’s no water to wash with.  And sure enough, peering into the pila, I discovered there were only a few measly inches of water left.  Angelita told me that they had to save that water for washing dishes and bathing, but that I could come back the next day, and maybe there would be water again.

Sadly, today dawned as water-stricken as the last three days.  I knew there was only one recourse.  I had to go hard-core, old-school Peace Corps.  I had to make a trip to the river.

My host sister offered to take me, so we loaded our clothes into buckets along with big, round cakes of soap.  While I carried my bucket awkwardly pressed against my side (finally, those wide, child-bearing hips of mine are serving a purpose!), Ana carefully set hers on top of her head and trotted off down the road.  Now, our road is pretty outrageous – an unpaved, dirt-and-rock combination that more closely resembles a (semi) dry riverbed than an actual street – but when we turned off the road to climb our way down to the river, I was certain I was gonna eat it somewhere.  The walk down is a muddy, rocky, slippery, vegetation-grown descent that befouls the good name of overgrown footpaths everywhere.  Off the beaten trail does not begin to describe it.  I was also fairly certain that there were some snakes hiding in the undergrowth somewhere.  (And since I’d already found a tarantula next to my dresser in the morning, I’d had my fill of unpleasant wildlife encounters for the day.)

To make me feel just a little more pathetic, Ana was traipsing nimbly down the trail in front of me in flips-flops and a skirt, balancing a bucket twice as wide as her hips on her head.  She was like some freakish, Salvadoran-washerwoman-spider-monkey amalgamation.  Seriously, is their perfect balance a learned thing, or have Salvadoran woman somehow genetically evolved?  Either way, I looked ridiculous behind her, plunging through the jungle fauna with a look of desperate fear on my face and a prayer on my lips.  This country is keeping me seriously humble.

However, I managed to make it down to the river without major mishap. 

Once we got down there, we had to search for good rocks to wash on.  I rolled up my khaki capris a little further and waded into the river, which was running particularly strongly, thanks to all that charming rain we’ve been getting.  (Fine, I get that the locals are all happy because the extra rain is helping their crops grow, and blah, blah, blah…but it’s also mildewing everything I own.  SO lame.)  I managed to find a place just below a medium-sized boulder, where the water rushed knee-deep all around me.  I couldn’t actually see the rocks I was balancing on because of how fast the water was moving, but I was hoping that they weren’t sheltering any cranky eels or river crabs that didn’t feel like getting stepped on.

Believe it or not, after scrubbing a few items over the rocks, I realized that (treacherous mountain climb aside) washing my clothes in the river is WAY easier than washing them in a pila.  Have you ever tried rinsing the suds out of a pair of heavy denim jeans one bucket at a time?  Takes forever.  In the river, all I had to do was hold them in the water near my feet, and maybe swish ‘em around a couple times.  Admittedly, I almost lost my soap a few times to the river, but all in all it was just simpler.

Of course, it started raining before I was done.  I was pretty well soaked anyway from the river (making me wish I’d been smart enough to bring my shampoo with me and bathe while I was down there), but after a little while, we realized that the droplets of water were filtering down through the trees rather than just splashing up from the river.  I finished before Ana (I had less clothes with me) and started back up.  The rain had really started falling, and if possible, the climb was even more precarious than before.  It had essentially become a muddy shoot that I had to try to make my way up.  It was like something out of one of those weird, extreme challenge reality TV shows.  (And yes, as usual, I was wearing flip-flops.  You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now.)  But I finally made it back to my house soaked to the skin, with dirty feet but (thankfully) clean clothes.  I have a clothesline on my side porch to hang things, so at least my clothes weren’t actively getting more wet.

Now all I have to do is wait six days for them to dry.  Humidity sucks.  Did I mention that I miss my dryer?