When I woke up today, I optomistically walked over to my faucet and gave it a shot. I turned it on, it sputtered, and then did nothing. No water today, I guess. So it goes.

Yesterday there wasn’t water either and, really, I wouldn’t have even bothered to have checked today if it wasn’t for the annoying fact that someone told me the water might be running. I can’t decide if its better to think you have water and most of the time not have it or just to know you don’t have it and make due without it.  There are so many unfulfilling turns of so many faucets that I wish I could have back. Optimism crushed is very deflating.

Way back when, I wrote about our highly technically sophisticated search for water (or, more specifically, a location to drill our borehole). Since then we’ve drilled not one, but two boreholes, built two massive metal water towers and another giant cement water tank, we’ve laid pipe, installed pumps, spent $20000 or more (maybe a little less, don’t quote me), and invested countless hours of problem-solving man-hours. And yet the water still rarely runs (not like how often you have a power outage rare, but like the stock market is up rare). We’ve had “running water” since at least sometime in late February and I’ve taken an overhead shower with water running through metal pipes and falling consistently on my head three times since then (though it is true I sometimes wait too long to capitalize on  the all too short and too few windows of running water we’ve had to take advantage and that I smell).

For a while (3 months), we just didn’t have water. No borehole, no pipes, no hope. Our water came by truck and by jerry can. I took a bucket, a cup, and I did what I could. Every once in a while I had a shower in Kigali. I wasn’t (am not) very clean. But it was okay (and I had shorter hair).

Someday soon our water will flow. It’ll come and then just keep coming. It’ll be a little hard to get used to, even.

When I shower with a bucket, I stand in another. I dump the water over my head and it all collects at my feet. I then flust my toilet. It’s very efficient and so, so satisfying. It’s like when you find a great use for something you were just about to throw away.

I like to say its not so bad that we’ve gone so long without a stable, water supply. With so many resources at our fingertips here in the village, such fancy houses to live in, and electricity that just never seems to go out (it doesn’t make any sense), it is easy to take for granted how challenging life can be here, or anywhere really. When the water starts flowing and flowing and flowing there will be great excitement (and relief) and then pretty soon we all get very used to it. But we will be thankful for it.

As I wrote before, water may very well be our most precious resource and too much of the world lives without stable access to it. When the toilet will fill up with water after every flush, what will I do with my greywater (re-usable waste water) from the shower then? It feels so wrong to just let it flush down the drain - even though that’s what I’ve been doing all my life.

I wrote in November that “Blue is the new Green.” I think it still is.

So think about that. I’m going to check the faucet, maybe hop in the shower - I heard there might be water tonight.