An American'a Water Shortage
Daily water collection. Photo by Alex Stonehill
Addis Ababa, ETHIOPIA —The water in our new house in Addis has been turned off for days and my back is so sore I’ve been squirming around on our dirty couches all evening begging for a position that doesn’t hurt.
It’s shameful how annoyed I am by the conjunction of these inconveniences given why I’m in Ethiopia at all. I’m here to research and write on water scarcity issues. In the past three days I’ve interviewed a woman whose son died of typhoid and a man who held four of his children as diarrhea from waterborne dysentery drained the life from their small bodies. I watched an old woman fall to her knees and kiss the ground in thanks of water.
I’m annoyed by the sputtering and empty pipes in my rented house because I haven’t showered in four days.
My back hurts because, as an experience, I volunteered along with other Seattleites here to witness water development programs, to help build the concrete platform for a community water spigot in impoverished rural Oromia.
In total, I spent maybe, maybe 3 hours hauling concrete and water in busted, leaking buckets on my back. As a result my spine feels permanently compacted. I’m convinced in my self-pity that I can actually feel the vertebrae rubbing against each other somewhere in the curve of my back.
Yesterday, I watched—taking notes and directing a cameraman—as a middle-aged rural Ethiopian villager secured three plastic buckets of dirty water onto her small frame, preparing to haul them kilometers back to her hut, where if it isn’t boiled properly it may poison her family.
Still I’m fuming about the shower, I stomp around the house and take a painkiller stashed away for emergencies, washing it down with a swig of St. George beer. I mutter about the rent (which in Addis, due to inflation and a housing crunch is actually equivalent to Seattle rents) and rub my face clean with chilled bottled water.
I come from a land of water parks, daily showers and green lawns. In my life, if my water use is equivalent to that of an average American (which amounts to roughly 100-150 gallons a day), I’ve already consumed more water in twenty-eight years than a village of sub-Saharan Africans may see in their entire lives.
But my scalp itches and I have visible dirt in the creases of my elbows. Licking my finger, I rub at it confirming layers of dust.
The author struggling with a bucket of cement.
Photo by Alex Stonehill
I come from a place where people pay money every month to burn calories on machines created for that purpose. I take $20 yoga classes once a week to rejuvenate and realign my body after long hard hours logged in front of a computer and driving my car.
$20 is what my new Ethiopian friend Yeta suggests the housekeeper in our compound probably makes in a month—maybe two.
Unless things in my life changes dramatically in coming years, I will probably never haul concrete on my back again.
I move to the floor and try some yoga stretching, thinking that the sinking foaminess of our busted up couch may be aggravating my back.
A little cockroach is zigzagging up the wall to the far corner of the living room, one of the guard dogs outside, chained up underneath a high wall reinforced with a gleaming rows of jagged glass, begins a hysterical bout of barking.
After five years in New York City I am actually accustomed to these two aggravations.
I’ve heard it said that my generation of Americans is the most privileged and powerful group of people that has ever inhabited the earth. I have no idea how people measure these kinds of things—what scale they could possibly use if it is true.
If it isn’t true, I don’t know where I picked it up.
I am not the first American traveler that has marveled at inequity and self-deprecated to make sense of it. It’s a clever way to relieve guilt too, to have set your self apart from the crime by noticing its being committed.
This is also an important tool of journalism.
“As you know the world’s next wars will be fought over water,” someone said to me last week. I’ve heard this warning before; it came up a lot in the past five months as I researched issues of evaporating water sources around the world and scoured statistics of the children in Africa that die every minute from diarrhea.
I’m thinking about how to use this quote in my article while I lie on the worn carpet and wait for the painkiller and beer to kick in. I’m thinking that most Seattlites haven’t heard this statistic and that if I infer that water is the next oil, maybe it’ll be shocking and sexy and they’ll be interested in my stories from Africa.
I scratch at my arm, I’m not sure if its dirt or the painkiller that is making me feel itchy.
Just this morning an editor wrote back and said they didn’t have a budget for international stories.
The painkiller has definitely kicked in—I fall half asleep and a late night breeze rushes through the shotgun house—In the front door and out the back.
It reminds me of an afternoon last summer—a really hot day in August.
My Dad and I took the dirty old van we deliver furniture in down to a lake near his house for a run. By the end we were so hot and tired our faces were flushed red and we gulped down all the water in our shared Nalgene bottle in seconds.
We sat down and took off our running shoes and socks and stashed them in the bushes with our water bottle, then we waded in with our clothes on. My running shorts billowed up with air pockets as I moved deeper and deeper into the cold water.
We swam out to the middle and floated on our backs. Somewhere it sounded like a high school band was practicing marches and I could see little model people pushing strollers and walking tiny dogs on the periphery—otherwise it felt like the middle of nowhere.
The splashing of water calls me back from the memory. Just as I’m falling asleep, the pain in my back dissolved, my concerns about hygiene submerged by exhaustion, I realize that someone in the compound is filling the water tank that serves our bathroom by hand, bucket by bucket, so that I can take a shower tonight.
© 2008 The Common Language Project
