Don't Drink the Water

My hands smell like bleach.  They always smell faintly of bleach and hopefully I'll eventually grow immune to the smell.  The water is not healthy here and every bit of produce must first be soaked in bleach water to prevent bacterial infections.  Every meal time I scrub carrots, potatoes, apples or green beans.  My hand emerged in the water grow saturated with the smell of bleach.

Other things smell funny here too.  My mom told me to "enjoy the mountain air."  I had to chuckle.  The city smells constantly of burning trash.  The acrid odor wakes me up in the morning and I can almost taste ash in my mouth.  Some mornings the smell permeates the house so completely that for a small second I wonder if the kitchen is on fire. Trash that is not burned is discarded in road-side, makeshift dumps.  Cows, goats and people crawl around mountains of refuse searching for food.

Our water is delivered every week by a big, white truck.  A large tank is filled and I sign paperwork acknowledging receipt of thousands of gallons.  It is a clear reminder of usage and waste.  I feel guilty and try to conserve every drop.  This sentiment becomes most acute while I watch my neighbors walking to an outhouse or bathing in an outside bucket.

Our drinking water is distilled and we have household rules for our protection.  No member of the family can put non drinking water in a drinking glass.  We are trying to prevent sickness but already I have had a short gap in memory and suffered the consequence.  I rinsed my tooth brush in water from the sink and spent the entire night sick.

Clean drinking water is a clear concept for adults but helping a child understand is much more difficult.  Every day I remind him to close his mouth tightly in the shower.  I turned my back and he was attempting to swim like a whale in the tub while taking huge gulps of dirty bath water.  In a few hours he was sick but recovered quickly.

In two short weeks I have become more aware of my own impact on our natural resources.  We've stopped using disposable diapers completely and I doubt I'll return to it again.  I reuse dish water, turn out the lights and every fresh glass of water tastes more fulfilling.  I cannot yet discern if this change will hold true when we return home to the states but today you could almost call me an environmentalist.