Rain rain, come back.... its another day!

I realized today that I have been in a sort of funk for the last couple of days.  It is the kind of funk that creeps up on you, so it is hard to notice it initially.  Generally, I try to avoid writing about these kind of days because by the time I get around to posting it here, the time has passed and I am back to my smiling self just to become stressed out again by family and friends who ask me if I’m feeling better now.  It seems that my biggest stress is having others worry about me.  Although  I don’t particularly like writing these posts, it is part of life as a Peace Corps Volunteer to have down times or maybe this out-of-it feeling is just a part of being human since it doesn’t take living in a 3^rd world county to feel like crap from time to time.   

It took me a while to recognize the symptoms.  I stopped being interested in all of my craft projects, no desire to knit stuffed toys or crochet a mat from my stockpile of plastic bags or weave sisal baskets or my latest craft of weaving grass baskets where chickens lay their eggs (I think they are beautiful, but need to find a function for them stateside).  Then I couldn’t summon the energy to read a book, which is what I do when my hands and brain are tired of crafting.   So I turned to watching movies on my computer and by now I have watched them all multiple times.  These things have become my coping mechanisms for passing the time.  I am in my hut around 5pm every night including most Fridays and Saturdays.  Socializing at night, like at home, is not really possible here.



Chicken basket made by me completely from grass



I figured out today the cause of the stress I have been feeling: it is the lack of rain!  I have never had to deal with the unavailability of water before so I never thought about how it could affect me.   I know that America is suffering from severely high temperatures and drought these days, but I bet you aren’t worried about your shower cutting out with shampoo still in your hair.  I also doubt that you know where the closest stream is with flowing water. 



Every morning I wake up to a gray cloud-covered sky and I wonder if today is the day that the dry season will come to an end.  By 10am the clouds have burned off as we head to another scorcher of a day even though it’s still supposed to be winter.  On the windy days I hope that this wind is blowing in a wet weather pattern instead of the inevitable dust storm.  I think that the last time the wind was from the south, no rain, so now it’s from the north, so maybe?!  Nope, denied.  At night I listen closely to the sounds that are being made on top of my tin roof, rain drops? No again, just the wind moving the branches above my house.

I use between 5-10 liters of water a day for drinking, cooking, washing dishes, bathing, etc.  I was my hair about every 5 days now which takes about 4 liters.  Laundry once every 2 weeks takes around 30 liters.  My garden on the homestead died about 3 weeks ago when the tank next to it finished.

During the summer months I lived exclusively off rain water, and although it was a pretty dry summer it was still sufficient to sustain my wants andneeds.  In fact I still have some of that summer water left, but now I am using it solely as drinking water and keeping it separate from the river water.  Rain water is pure and clean while river water could be contaminated with micro-organisms, pesticides, and other gross things that I don’t want to think too much about since they are used for watering holes for the cows that pee and poop.  People bathe in the river, do their laundry in the river, and the few that own cars get them washed in the river.  If those aren’t reasons enough to justify keeping the water separate, I will always remember back to the day when I was still new in my community.  I didn’t prepare enough water for the day.  They teach us to boil and then filter our water to make it safe for drinking, but I decided that they were just being overprotective, and boy was I wrong!  I was sick for the next two days, laying on my floor in front of my fan when bodily fluids weren’t coming out either end.  Fortunately, that has been the only time I was sick like that throughout the whole year and I have only had one Cold which was over a year ago, right when I arrived this side (knock on wood, don’t want to jinx my good health for the coming year).

The water infrastructure in Swaziland is definitely lacking and ready access to clean drinking water is a definite luxury.  These are two facts I knew before coming to Swaziland but the reality of their impact seemed so abstract and hypothetical until I was actually living here for a year and having to adapt to water being a scarce resource.  The water infrastructure in my area consists of community taps along the road which remind me of camping at the RV parks.  However, the taps have not functioned since last October.  Fortunately my Make pays some guys with a tractor to take all the barrels to the river to get them filled, thankfully eliminating any physical labor on my part.  Most of my neighbors cannot afford to do this and instead have to do the work by hand (or foot or head, not sure of the right term here).  They carry 50 liter water containers either on their head (like it’s not difficult and no big deal) or they carry them with a wheelbarrow (or both at the same time) from the closet river or from the clinic which has the only working tap in the community.  It takes at least 30 minutes to walk to each of those locations from my homestead.  The clinic is halfway up a mountain so the way home would be downhill at least and the river is way down in a valley which would make the walk home horribly tiring.

Ok, here ends my rant on water.  Now you can add running hot/cold water to the list of things you are especially grateful for today as I anxiously await my next hot shower.   I can already feel the little black cloud that has been hanging over my head lifting (or looming, perhaps with some rain!).  It feels good to rant very now and then or maybe the good feeling is because NSYNC is playing on my iTunes!

In other news:  I am continuing to teach a lot of knitting to various groups around the community.  We started with cellphone bags.  Next we will move on to hats, leg warmers, and hopefully to stuffed animals which I like to make.

We had rescheduled a clean-up campaign scheduled for this week, which is postponed again.  Hopefully, third try will be the charm.

I have named the puppy that I wrote about in the last post.  My sister suggested the name Otto as an homage to my hometown, Syracuse.  After trying it out for a day or so and then my mom pointing out that Otto was a boy’s name, the name just wasn’t rolling off my tongue right.  So instead her name has transformed to Toto which is also fitting as ‘there is no place like home.’

Much needed vacation to Durban, South Africa’s 3^rd largest city and right on the beach commences in 2 weeks!

That’s all for now.  The sky is looking gray… maybe rain tonight?

Probably not! L