just clean water

We woke up this morning and found that we had no running water. Our neighbor Jill told us this was quite normal, and that usually within a few hours, the water comes back on.

So now we know that we should not only store bottles of boiled water for drinking and teeth brushing (which we’ve been doing)—but also keep bottles of tap water on hand for cooking and flushing toilets and rinsing out soapy hair when the water stops in the middle of a shower.

Guess it’s just part of the deal in living here—having to think a lot more about, and devote a lot more energy to things we’ve never really had to think about--like clean water and stable electricity.

It’s a sobering reminder of what a great privilege it is to have clean water. On our way to town, we pass by children drinking water of questionable quality from a leak in a pipe on the road. Street kids beg for our half-finished bottles of Dasani water as we walk around.

We know that even though we complain about water outages, or the smell and taste of tap water, or find it disconcerting that the water we would normally trust to clean dishes and vegetables is itself not so clean—even so--we have options.

We have the money to buy bottled or filtered water, a kettle to heat it up with, and the (perhaps naïve) comfort knowing that we are choosing to live like this, and at any moment we could if we wanted to (and God willing), go back to places where we don’t have to think about water at all.

It’s really humbling. We hope that we can be good stewards of all that we’ve been given.

“...all we want is light and water: just clean water and plain daylight, better than any jewels…”
Sam in Lord of the Rings (of course)