Water Again

It has finally started raining after months of drought. Dry, dry, dry, and dusty. Everything in the house was covered with dust a few minutes after being mopped.

We have a large cistern, but it was way down. For the first time since we've lived in this house, we had to buy water trucks. We ended up buying three before the rain started last week. Each truck contains 3,000 gallons of water, and costs about $40 US. That seems expensive, but most of the people who live in this city don't have a cistern to store water in and have to buy theirs by the bucket. In this interesting article, I read the following: "Sometimes, the poor have to pay 10 or 20 times more than their well-off neighbours for safe water, according to UNDP statistics: those on-tap normally pay far less than those buying from street tanks and by the bucket." We're not exactly "on-tap." We are connected to city water, but it only comes a couple of times a week, and then we have to store it. But the fact that we can buy a whole truck at a time means that we get a much better deal.

Here's an article on water in Lagos, Nigeria.

Here's one on water in Haiti.

Here's a link to the BBC's series "Water Walks."

I posted about water before here.