Hunting water is awfully tiring. Yesterday I spent much of the first half of the day watching two Indians and their three Rwandese workers survey several patches of nearby fields in search of water. In this age of technology and electronic gadget wonderland, what these tests consisted of was two cables attached to a briefcase, where two men, one with each end of a cable, walked ten meters, hammered a stake attached to the cable end into the ground, and then the head Indian pressed a green button on his briefcase, typed the number it spat out into his calculatior, and then used a pen to write down this new number on a pad of paper. They then walked ten more meters and repeated, for like two more hours.  All the while, just yards away, I played games and skyped with my friends on my iphone. If I can connect to the internet on my phone in the middle of nowhere, someone needs to give me a good reason why they’re still doing geological surveys with pen and paper.

Anyways, what we were doing (other than feeling like you were watching a first season episode of “Lost” where they have to keep pressing the same button every 60 seconds) is searching for a place to drill a borehole. As it stands now, it would be charitable to refer to our water supply as “unstable.” In fact, much of the time they don’t pump water to us and we have to fill our tanks from trucked in tankers. When they do manage to pump, it is at an absurd cost.

Indeed, one of the greatest and most pressing challenges facing Africa is access to water. While few outside of the fancy rich have any access to running water, more and more Africans are connected to water by daily, sometimes many kilometer, hikes to a community well/ spring/ water supply. While we in the West consume and waste water like it grew on trees, African consumption is rarely more than a jerry can’s worth. Apart from better access to water in the home, one thing that an improved and connected water supply could mean is irrigation and improved agrarian productivity.

So in the spirt of James Bond and “Quantum of Solace”, where Bond’s newest villain declares that water is “the world’s most precious resource,” here is a link to a great New York Times piece on how “Blue is the new Green” and what we can do to lead the world to solve these challenges instead of recklessly proliferating them. Because, after all, water is life.