Life in Zobue: Water

Continuing my Life in Zobue series, here I'm going to talk about water.  Most homes here in Zobue do not have running water so every day women and girls carry water from the nearest pump back to their homes for bathing, cooking, washing dishes, drinking, and cleaning.  To carry this water, they balance the full jugs on their heads.  Emma and I employ a local woman named Rute and her mother Fatima to bring us water every other day.  The jugs are quite heavy and our nearest pump is pretty far away so these women are very strong.  One day I carried the smallest of our jugs home from the pump on my head and it was hard! I made it home, but barely, and I spilled about a quarter of it on myself on the way.  

Here is our water storage area.  Rute even carries the big blue one in the middle/back on her head.  It holds about 50 liters...which weighs over 100 pounds.

Doing dishes with baby Wilder.

But where does the water come from? Is it clean? Safe to drink?

In Zobue, some people have hand-dug wells in their yards that provide them with water.  They have a bucket on a string that they lower down, fill with water, and bring back up again.  This source of water is convenient, but since the top is open it can easily get contaminated.

Other people in Zobue (including me) pay 20 meticais (about 60 cents) per month to use one of various closed water pumps to get their water.  Since the top is closed there is no way for trash and debris to get in and contaminate the water, so it is very clean.  I still filter and bleach my water before drinking it though, just to be safe.

This is an example of one of the closed water pumps that exist around town.

This girl is stabilizing the water jug with her hands, but most women are able to balance these heavy jugs on their heads without requiring stabilization. They sometimes even carry two more smaller jugs of water in each hand while still having the big one on the head.  Amazing.

Some people get their water from the small streams that run through town.  This water is not very clean, but serves well for clothes washing and bathing.  Many women carry their laundry down to the stream and wash it there to save the trouble of carting lots of water just for washing clothes.  They then bring the clothes home and hang them up to dry in their yards.

This is Silvia carrying her laundry to the stream to wash.

So far we haven't had any water shortages, but I haven't yet been here in the height of the dry season so I don't really know how scarce the water gets.  I've heard that in the dry season some of the hand-dug wells go dry so there is more demand for the closed pumps since they are deeper.  This means that the lines for water start getting long and people have to line up at 4 am to get a good spot in the line.  Hopefully this year the ground will have enough water to last through the dry season and there won't be any problems, but you never know.