Living Without Water in Rural South Africa: A Firsthand Account

When you move to a foreign country, one of the first areas you usually have to adapt to is a change in climate... long before the culture has an effect. Here in South Africa, we've had to make a huge adjustment in climate, both in temperature and humidity. And the biggest necessary adjustment of all is a lack of water.

It was about a month after we moved to our village before the water issue really began to sink into our psyches. Overall, there's just a huge shortage of available water, this past year especially. Living among such a huge shortage of water, it really teaches us the value of something we've so often taken for granted - just like the air we breathe.

In our village, there is no water supply or tap system like we're used to in America. No one, including us, has running water inside their home. That means no sinks for washing vegetables or dishes. No showers or tubs. No flush toilets. Certainly no dishwashers or washing machines. The only way to store and use water is with huge jugs and large bowls. That means that anyone who wants water has to go fetch it from a limited range of water supply choices and transport it back to their home.

There's really only a few sources of water between our village and the nearest one to us. Most people can only choose between two options, but for lack of money, are dependant on only one: the river. For those with enough money (what you might call the "elite" of the village - those few teachers and those few others with jobs outside the community), they can hire someone to transport large jugs of water from a nearby town. In American terms, it's relatively inexpensive, but in rural South African terms, the number of people who can afford it are really very few.

So for the rest, there's the river. If we were to walk at a brisk pace straight to the river's water supply point from our part of the village, while carrying nothing, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes. With the unusual lack of rain this past year, that area is often dry and then people have to either dig a deep hole into the river bed or search even further.

People have to carry their jugs (usually 20-30 liters each) completely on foot, including up and down a few somewhat steep hills. Some people have wheelbarrows so that they can bring a few at a time, and some people carry them on their head, which allows only one at a time. As you can imagine, this trip can require well over an hour of hard labor and it's something that has to be repeated every day or even twice a day (since most people also have very large families and many children).

Since the river so frequently dries up, the water that most people are using for drinking, bathing, cooking, etc. is also stagnant. There's also no way of knowing what pollutants may have entered the water upstream or from run-off on the rare occasions that it does rain.

On Saturdays, people have the strenuous chore of transporting their clothes to and from the river for washing them - mixing laundry detergent in for anyone who might be fetching water downstream. Thankfully, they don't drink all that much water anyway and almost all food is prepared by boiling, so it's likely that most harmful elements (except chemical ones) in the water are sterilized.

For my wife and me, we're not given extra money by our development organization to pay someone to bring us water every time we need it. But the schools where we're working have allowed us to get water from their boreholes and water storage tanks.

One of our schools is only about half a kilometer (maybe 1/3 of a mile) away and it's only slightly sloping uphill on the return to our house. So we take a wheelbarrow and fetch about 130 liters of water twice a week. It's definitely a workout, but it's much easier than most of our neighbors' only option.

The water we use is very clean water with only a very small amount of sediment in it. We use the water for bathing (by cup - kind of like a shower), washing our hands, cooking, drinking, and washing our clothes. Our organization also provided us with Brita water filters, so everything we drink, we filter first.

You may ask why the schools don't allow the entire community to have access to such a ready supply of clean and nearby water. Well, that comes back to the lower-than-average rainfall this year, and the fact that there really never is much rain in our village anyway.

According to the old racially-segregated system of Apartheid, most black South Africans were forced to live in territories known as "Homelands", much like the reservation system created for Native Americans in USA. These areas were often chosen because they were areas that the ruling white minority didn't want - because of lack of rainfall and other reasons. There certainly are parts of South Africa that receive quite a lot of annual rainfall and they can grow a wide variety of crops, but the "Former Homelands" are definitely not those areas.

Though the "Homelands" system was abolished nearly 15 years ago and black South Africans are free to move wherever they want, many choose to remain at home near their families, in the only place they've known growing up: the "Homeland". And thus Apartheid's old, now abolished legislation continues the cycle of living in a fairly undesirable place to live (from an agricultural perspective, that is).

But this past year, the rain was drastically low in an already dry part of the country. They say the rain is usually supposed to start heavy around the end of August. But it wasn't until late November that we began to get a few rains. Oftentimes, even when the rain clouds come in, they somehow miss our village or just aren't full enough to dump much water anywhere but on the sides of mountains much further away.

Of course, no one knows why the rain was so little and so late last year. One man from a major city blamed it on Global Warming. But most people in the village have never heard of global warming and their concerns are more immediate: drinking, cooking, and growing subsistence crops.

In most normal years, our village is overloaded with mango and avocado harvests, and each person is able to grow a significant portion of their necessary maize and other vegetables. But because the rain was so ate and so little this past year, most people weren't able to sow their seeds in time and most trees produced only a few mangoes, if any. I've also heard many related complaints about how skinny the villagers' cattle are becoming.

Many times before the first rain last year, I would ask people what they think of the water situation and if rain would come anytime soon. I get a classical two-part African response: "Sure! Of course it will!" ... "If it doesn't come soon, we'll all die!" followed by a chuckle and a warm smile.

I suppose many South Africans are used to living on the narrow edge of needed resources, right between just enough and a woefully short supply. And yet life goes on, and that kind of light-hearted look at it all is definitely reassuring as the dry weeks dragged on.

So, this year especially, the water table where our schools boreholes' draw their water supply can get dreadfully low. Many children get their main meal of the day provided by the school. So the school needs quite a bit of water for their garden and to cook everything and to make sure the children also have something to drink during the day.

Some days when the water table is too low for the schools' boreholes to pump enough water into their storage tanks, kids can go home hungry and thirsty. If everyone in the village were allowed access to this short supply of water, the children certainly wouldn't have enough. So, the school has to draw a line somewhere and they decided to include us in it. Some days we feel bad for being part of the privileged few, but most days we're just glad to have clean water.

For our own part, we use as little water as we can, to make what we have goes further and to spare us more frequent trips hauling water! We have a small bowl with a small amount of water that we wash our hands in all day. We try not to bathe everyday (though we often have to wash our feet), and when we do, we use a small amount of water - just enough to get our bodies wet and to wash off the soap.

We try not to use many dishes so we don't have to wash them as much and we only wash our clothes every other week and only the ones that are noticeably dirty or smelly. Then, when we're done with the water in each of these bowls, we use it to water our small garden and some of our fruit-bearing trees.

We also have a barrel for catching run-off from our roof whether there's a light sprinkle or a full storm. The only area in which we give ourselves freedom to splurge is drinking water. It's just too often too hot to cut that short!

The good thing is, a water supply for our village is in the works. The local municipality has been busy laying pipes to bring a water supply to the village - whereby people could access several taps throughout to have a closer, cleaner supply of water.

Unfortunately, with South African bureaucracy the way it is, the project may never reach completion. One of the pipes was laid in the open under a bridge that a nearby railroad crosses over. Now the railway owner wants a few hundred thousand dollars for "permission" to turn the water on. This conflict has been going on for months now and no one is sure if it'll ever be settled. But it's a definite hope.

And in the end, it can sometimes be just like the rain: a forecaster can say it's coming, but too many disappointments teach you that you can't expect it until it's actually pouring down. But this year is an election year in South Africa and there are lots of local politicians that would love to be re-elected. Maybe our village and a few others will get a readily available, clean supply of water with all the political maneuvering. We'll have to wait and see.