Low Tide

Take a moment to think of all the times throughout your day you turn the faucet and are guaranteed clean fresh water. Water availability does not concern the blessed of humanity living in developed countries. On the other hand, in struggling countries such as Nicaragua, water constantly trickles across the thin line between life and death.

Facundo, who takes care of our house (yes, we have a “security guard” in a town of 1,500) lives in the small nearby community of el Imirez. At age 40 Facundo’s grin rings toothless and his two-room house shelters 12 people (four adults, eight children). His youngest, Larry, made the hour-hike-three-hour-bus ride to Somoto to the nearest hospital twice last year due to stomach parasites you and I in America will never worry about. The issue goes beyond lack of early childhood nutrition (which certainly exists in places like Imirez where people subsist on ground corn tortillas and rice donated by USAID projects) to much deeper and more serious issues. Lack of preventative health care and the non-existence of clean drinking water lead children like Larry down a malnourished road where survival, simple survival, matters most.

For Christmas last year, Lauren and I bought Facundo’s family a $14 water filter from a Nicaraguan run Potters for Peace business. The filter, sized to hold about four gallons of water in a clay barrel, will last their family for more than five years. Facundo’s family can now collect water from the community well and run it through the filter, secure that parasites will not seep through the filter’s silver alloy shell. He tells Lauren and I with a wide smile that the family’s water filter is the pride of their small village, that neighbors come by for a glass of clean water or just to marvel at the “miracle machine”. While this type of solution works short-term, it does not solve the long-term issue at hand.

Luckily Facundo’s family lives in a community with a well. Others are not so fortunate. In Aguas Calientes (where Osvaldo’s grandmother lives), about 3 hours further down the mountain, habitants must carry their family’s water supply in plastic barrels from the local river. More than backbreaking work, my heart breaks each time I see a small barefoot child weighed down lugging a fifty-pound container of water back to her family’s one-room adobe home, instead of playing or attending kindergarten… knowing full well that the water may make her family sick.

In Cusmapa, water’s non-availability writes an entirely different story. The majority of households here own a 5-foot-wide by 4-foot-deep “pila” or cement storage tank for water. The city gives water once per week; it trickles through rusty faucets to fill these meager holding containers. If the week’s water supply runs dry, the house’s inhabitants must survive without water until further notice. The pila’s faucet provides the house’s only plumbing. Families use pila water for bathing, washing dishes, washing clothes, washing the floor, drinking, and cooking. Though I’ve heard rumor that water received from the town of Cusmapa is technically filtered and safe for drinking, it comes from the closest river at the bottom of the mountain. I’ve splashed around in that river and consciously not dunked my head. Yet thousands of people in the area DRINK water pumped directly up the mountain from that river. Not for want, but for absolute necessity.

I began writing this with a nag in the back of my mind, whining about our own house’s lack of water for the past 18 days (though Cece and I have only been back in Cusmapa for 10 days)… but thinking about it more thoroughly I realize that at no point during this time have we been TRULY without water. We have access to drinking water, water for the dump-flush method of toilet flushing, and water for cleaning dishes. It’s a minor inconvenience to someone like me, who lives in Nicaragua with the support and resources provided by a larger organization. I do not fend for myself here by any means. I am not forced to send my 11-year-old sister out every morning at dawn to stagger up the mountain loaded down with barrels of river water.

Every day I live here I learn more about conservation and the importance of not taking what we consider to be basic life essentials for granted.

Next time you brush your teeth, gulp down a glass of cold tap water without a thought of the repercussions, flush a toilet, or take a hot shower, think of the action on a deeper level. Consider how blessed you are to live in a place with access to these resources, do not take them for granted. Take what actions you can to ensure that others do not live to survive, rather live to thrive.