On Water.
Having spent time in the American West and many of it's desert environs, I have felt how water, or lack there of, informs everything around it. There the green of a river valley or even the collected pools of springs are welcome enlivening sights and human settlement is grouped around them. In Guyana, where water is everywhere, the principle still holds as the rivers here are also the pathways of life. Of course the rivers are immense in Guyana, coming from deep in the tropical rainforest, winding their way through the interior and exiting into the Atlantic ocean. I have only seen two of the rivers, the Berbice and the Demerara. While it takes a ferry half an hour to cross the Berbice, this river I'm told, is a shadow of the size of the Essiquibo which is at some points over 20 miles wide.
There is no shortage of water here. Instead the problem is getting it to flow. The Dutch are responsible for the sea wall system that holds back the ocean from the coastal lowlands where over 90% of the population lives and which would be, and sometimes still is, underwater were it not for the dikes.
While walking in Georgetown, the capital city, the remnents of the aquaduct system line the streets, and it is possible to see how it once channeled rainwater through cement and wood efficently and cleanly. Unfortunately this system has been neglected for decades and now represents a fairly fetid collection of semi-stagnate, vegetated causeways which gather refuse and nessitate watching where you step so that you don't plunge through a rotten wooden manhole cover and into what lies below.
In New Amsterdam, the system is much simpler, mostly just dirt cut ditches meant to flow in a grid and out to the river. Depending on the street you are walking on this system still performs fairly well, although it is the dry season currently so I can't really say much for sure. On many of the side streets though, large sections of the system are filled with overgrowth and the detritus of a society where plastic is used in everything, but no one comes around to collect it and landfill it, let alone recycle. When it rains, as it has for the last three days in hour to three hour bursts even in this the dry season, standing pools of water collect everywhere. For example the entrance to the Post Office in New Amsterdam is currently covered by a large pond around four feet deep which simply is there and avoided by planks until the sun drys it out.
Our yard is a good example of the terrain. It alternates between dry highground and ponds where it is low. While this is a good excuse for owning some good muck boots to get around in, it also allows for a wide variety of flora to flourish. Origionally I had gotten ambitious and started cleaning out the ditch in our front yard, with the idea that I would reconnect the channels coming from our backyard into the main ditch. Keep the water flowing and thereby drain at least some of the swamp in the middle of the yard, leaving the pond in the back for the Queen Anne's Lilies. Before I started I took a few minutes to inspect the street drainage and realized that if I opened up our yard to it that it was more than likely that the main drainage would flow back into the yard not the other way around. So I did what I thought was prudent and left well enough alone. I kind of like wearing muck boots anyways.
For the last two hours it has been raining, though raining is too mild a word. I would choose deluge where it not for wanting to keep some adjectives in reserve for when the real rains come down. It had been dry for about 6 days and the channels were starting to shrink, the tadpoles begining to feel desperate, and me starting to get ideas again about my ability to cause the yard to be dry. In the course of this last rain there is now up to 3 ft of standing water in the low spots and the channels are overflowing. And it keeps raining. So I think I will take the lesson to heart this time that water takes care of itself here, and goes where it wants to, and it is simply best to get out of the way.
Drinking water is another matter altogether.
Seperate even from water inside the house.
We have a tank on a platform built above the height of the house in the back yard. When the municipal water supply comes on, either at 6-8 am, 12-1 pm, or 6-8 pm (roughly of course, somedays it is more like 5-7 or 7-9 or really any variation that you can think of), we turn on a pump and push the supply up to the tank and then let gravity bring it into the house with decent pressure. I would hazzard to guess that three quarters of the population doesn't have a storage system and gets water only when the municipal supply flows. If one could call it that, maybe ebbs and flows is more to the point as more often than not the supply is a trickle which pulses and glue for the pipes isn't remotely necessary to keep the pipes together, which is good for many of them are not glued together in the first place.
The system has no integrity which presents just one of the problems with drinking the municipal supply. It has no backflow checks to prevent waste from entering it, more leaks than possible to imagine and this couple with the fact that the supply lines criss-cross and sometimes run through the middle of the drainage channels one can only guess what is in the piped water. I'd guess some parasites at the least- occasional bursts of cholera perhaps. So everyone who can afford it buys drinking water in the form of five gallon jugs.
Of course these cost anywhere from 300-600 Guyanese dollars (roughly 2.50-5$ U.S.) and the average worker, when they can find work, makes between 1,000- 3,000 Guyanese dollars a day (between 5-15$ US). I'm guessing that many people drink the water, most definately the rain water, though they tend to take in water in the form of tea(boiling kills most things) or bottled beverages. We have been going through an average of 15 gallons of drinking water a week. The rough math on that works out to say 6,000 guyanese dollars a month. The average teachers salary is 20,000 Guyanese a month. Our drinking water intake is fairly odd for people around here, most don't believe me when I say the amount. But, it is hard to imagine not drinking that much when it's so consistantly warm and I have yet to get behind the drinking of a hot beverage to cool off, though many swear by it.
To get the water I ride to the store on the bike, about 1 mile away, with the empty bottle upsidedown in the front basket. Then Strap the full bottle onto the back stand and slowly navigate with it home, always one hand on the handlebars and one behind me steading the bottle through the bumps.
I did this once at night and found it quite amusing, as there are no street lights, the roads are filled with potholes and people, bikes, cars and animals are going everywhich way. I found it best to get a car behind me and pedal like mad hoping to see enough of the road ahead, before the car passed, to attempt to memorize the patterns of the potholes and pedestrians. It was fun once, and as long as I don't go down side streets again that I did not know in the daytime, even fairly managable. But the next time I'll take a headlamp.
Since the rains have come for the last few days two things have changed. First the bike riding in getting more interesting, really becoming kind of a navigational challenge. Riding on ridges the width of the bike tire between deep potholes filled with water, with a five gallon bottle of water slushing back and forth behind you, and one hand on the handle bar is easy for even small children here. I foolishly decided once, or should I say lost control of the bike once, and headed straight into a pothole. It was on our very own street and I thought OH that one isn't that bad everything will be fine. Only to find my front tire submerged in mud up to the handlebars. I just managed to jump off in time to prevent the whole bike and the waterbottle from disappearing all together.
It also seems that with just about every heavy rain the power goes out for at least a few hours afterwards. Not really a problem and candle light is very nice to live by, but the pump which moves water up to the tank is electric and the outages have very convienetly happened during the municiple water supply hours. Luckily there is a tap outside which we still can get water out of even when the tank is empty, but it makes me much more vigilant about filling the tank up when we can.
It's all a far cry from our apartment in Philadelphia, where unthinkingly I could turn on the tap on the third floor and instantly get pressurized, pasturized, hot and cold, clean water. But not unlike when I lived at Holden Village, I am thinking again about the importance of water for existence and remembering that it has to come from somewhere and with someones help. I can not simply expect it to be there for me; for by taking water for granted I take life for granted. It also makes me laugh to realize that less than one month ago I was reconsidering using my plastic nalgene bottle to store my drinking water in, because studies are starting to show that the plastic leeches into the water and this is not good for you to some degree. This is not an issue that the Guyanese have the luxury to worry about.