All Things Water

Water is a big deal here, and its not just because I live three miles from the beach. No, there's a lot more to it than that. There is, for example, the fact that there is a moat forming outside of our compound. Soon we are going to have to hire a donkey that we can ride across anytime we need to go anywhere. Why is this moat happening? Well, it turns out that one of the water supply lines in our neighborhood broke. The piping here is rubber, not steel, so it doesn't rust, but its pretty close to the surface of the ground, so it breaks often. Evidently, someone is going to come along and patch it up sometime soonish. But not replace it.

I'm not personally too worried about it though, because I don't drink tap water. It's kind of like Mexico that way here.

So the other thing people like to use water for is showering. The thing in the Gambia is, your showers tend to be on the cold side. And since the Gambia was colonized by the British, they also tend to be of the variety where the shower head is on a hose rather than attached to the wall. I'm really not sure what the Europeans were thinking.

This weekend I went on a little trek upriver. I live pretty close to the coast, and the city, but sometimes we venture out into the more rural areas. One thing you gain a whole new appreciation for, while in Africa, is indoor plumbing. In case you don't believe me, I'm serious. Traveling around here requires self-imposed dehydration, because if there's one thing you don't want to go trying out in third world countries, its gas station bathrooms. (We tried it. Trust me.)

We stayed at a pretty nifty camp at our trek upriver to Janjangbury. On the last morning, however, we all figured out that the water that we were showering and brushing our teeth in came (definitely unfiltered) out of the Gambia River. That would be all fine and good (we were camping, after all), except we established that our toilets also flushed to the same location.

Mmmmm.

But truly, this experience is giving me a whole new appreciation for infrastructure and plumbers. Its also fairly easy for me to sit here whining in my house that has running water and a big cooler of filtered water to drink, near the city where it probably wouldn't hurt me much if I decided to start drinking tap water anyways. There are plenty of Gambians out in the villages who pump and haul unsafe water from their wells, one bucket at a time. That, my friend, is a serious problem.