This morning I woke up at 5:30a.m. for some reason, so I decided to wash up some dishes before settling down to finish some work. As I was washing the dishes, I became extremely conscious of how much water I was using. The past few days, I have been really noticing how much water I use, and how little of it I actually drink. Back in the village, the water used to wash dishes and clothes were all carried by jerricans, from ‘bore holes’. Bore holes are the places in the village where water pumps have been installed, so most villagers make a morning and night trip to get water, often having to walk for a good half hour to and from. Girls and women usually do this job—in the morning, women do this with babies on their backs; in the evening, girls as young as 10 years old do this job as part of their after school chores. Thinking of all the times I passed by on my way home from work, I remember when those girls would walk along the dirt roads, heads held high balancing the 5L yellow jerricans of water on their way home. Seeing me, they would excitedly extend a hand to wave, sometimes tilting their head a little to keep the water balanced. And my account of how people get water in my village represents a better story than most in Africa. Knowing how effortlessly my water streams out of my tap, I keep reminding myself not to take it for granted, as easy as it is to do. If the twelve kids in our summer kindergarten class were in my kitchen while I washed my dishes with such clean water, they would all be rushing to drink the water that trickled, wasted, down the bowls. All the times I leave the tap on carelessly in the year before I went to Uganda, I could have accumulated enough water to supply the village for a good summer.
I know that my saving water really won’t have much impact on the Ugandans who I think of. But it’s a matter of principle. Water is such a precious resource, and we’ve been spoiled in the richer countries to the point where we’re oblivious to the fact. We treat it as if it were nothing, ‘it’s okay to waste it, what harm does that do to anyone?’.