Week Five: Water, Water, Water

Habari!

 I hope everyone had a great weekend and was able to stay warm! 

As I mentioned last week, this week I wanted to share with you all my living experience in Tanzania - particularly in regards to water. 

If you think about it, we use A LOT of water here in the United States. To wash our hands, do our dishes, wash our clothes, take our showers, brush our teeth, flush our toilets, and to drink to stay hydrated. We might also use water to help plants grow, mop the floors, or make ice to keep our drinks cool. It is really easy to forget how lucky we are sometimes!

When I was living in Tanzania, my house did not have running water. In fact, my house did not even have a sink, a shower, or even a faucet. We learned that there were two ways of getting water: either collecting buckets of rain water outside during rainy season, or having students carry buckets of water to our houses (they knew that I was not strong enough to carry my own water from the water pump).

Whenever we thought it was going to rain, we would put our basins outside underneath where our roof drips into our courtyard. If we forgot to put it out, we didn't collect any water...so there were days while I ran home in between classes to double check our basins were out!

This water could only be used to quickly rinse your hands (if you had charcoal or dirt on them) or to flush our toilet or clean where we spit out our toothpaste. This water was dirty because while it was rainwater, we kept it outside and uncovered, and within a day you could see organisms and algae start to grow (see how the middle basin is dirty? That water is older than the one with the soccer ball on the left). 

Our best invention was this: We went to a hardware store and bought a spicket, then we went to a market and bought a bucket, and then we walked one afternoon to town to have a fundi, which is a handyman make us this makeshift water tap. The water in here was water we got from the students who carried water for us. We used this to wash our hands and to help save water when we washed our dishes! Also it was great when we were rinsing the suds out of our small clothing items! Underneath we put another basin to collect our dirty water and also used that to flush our toilet.

When my roommate and I left Muyenzi, we gave this "sink" to the girl's dormitory on campus to use outside of their bathroom.

Here is the only water pump I knew how to find, but I know there are a couple more near our house. This one, around the same distance as the others, was about 1.5 miles away. Everyone who lived in the area went to one of these few water pumps for ALL of their water needs. 

These are elementary school girls walking with their water in the afternoon (while wearing their school uniforms!)

Here are some of my secondary school students carrying water back to their houses. Because the water is so heavy, the girls take a fabric and make a bit of a hat out of it, and rest the bucket on top of that. It's still heavy, but it's easier to carry long distances this way. As they walk, the girls sing songs, chat with one another, or greet other people walking on the paths and roads. 

Off of our courtyard, Elizabeth and I had a room where we were able to store our buckets of water.  Because there were bugs, lizards and bats that lived in the roof, we tried to keep as many of the buckets covered as we could, but sometimes, our water would become too contaminated and we couldn't use it.

These five buckets would usually have to last us an entire week -- that's about one bucket a day. It meant that I was only able to take one shower a week, but that left us enough water for cooking and drinking, so it was a price I was happy to pay.

Here I am putting some eggs in to boil! That pot is sitting on my kitchen -- it was just a part of the courtyard where I would put out our charcoal grill, light the charcoals, and cook over. It wasn't easy, but once the coals got hot -- it didn't take more than 30 minutes to get to a boil! Every night, we spent about 2 hours cooking dinner, and another hour boiling water for tea or making boiled eggs for the next day.

Here are some of the girls from the girls' dormitory washing their clothes! All clothes have to be washed by hand -- which takes a lot of skill if you're messy like me! I ended up paying someone to wash my clothes most of the time, but a few weeks these lovely students of mine washed my clothes and sheets for me, which was so nice of them. 

  

Because we had to take "showers" outside in our courtyard, we would wear a swimsuit while we bathed. You can see our swimsuits and towels hanging up to dry after an afternoon shower! We would fill a basin with about 6 cups of water for our bodies (using a loofah and soap) and then when we emptied that basin, we would fill it again to wash our hair with shampoo, and one more time for conditioner! In total, about 20 cups of water for a whole shower.

That's a little over 1 gallon of water. When I looked up how much water a shower uses, it's 2.5 gallons A MINUTE! So, if you took an entire shower in 30 seconds, that's how much water I used...once a week. 

 Other ways we saved water was by using wet wipes to wipe off dirt from our face, arms, legs and feet during the week, paying other people to do our laundry, using 'dirty' water to flush the toilet (about 1-2 cups a flush), and using hand sanitizer to wash our hands rather than use water. 

We were frugal with our water because my students had to carry water for us, and we knew we couldn't possibly carry it ourselves. Students left during school hours to go and fetch water for all of their teachers, and I wanted to put as little of a burden on them as possible. However, we could have been very wasteful with our water, and asked them to bring us 5 buckets a day if we wanted! I just knew that it was more important for them to be in the classroom or be doing fun academic activities with their classmates.

And that's that! Some weeks we had a lot of water, some weeks we really struggled. But overall, it wasn't that bad. 

But I have to admit, every time we went to a bigger city with a shower, it was my favorite part of the vacation!!!

Next week, I'll be back to share with you some local Tanzanian foods as well as some customs! 

Kwa heri,

Marisa 

Weekly Challenge:

1. Write down all of the times you used water and why for one whole day. The next day, look at the list you made and think about how you might conserve some of that water. How could you use less water?