Water

One of the most obvious differences between Kenya and the US is the process of dealing with water use and consumption. In the US, water use is quite simple: you turn on the tap or your appliances are hooked directly to a water source. In Kenya, not so much.

We are incredibly fortunate to live in an apartment with running water. We have a tap for bathing (M uses the swimming pool as his personal shower also) and running water from sinks to wash our hands. This is far more than the average Kenyan has. Mary (my friend who I teach with) does not have running water in her place so all water must be carted from a well. Think about all the times you turn on a tap in your house and imagine that she has to accomplish all those tasks with water from a jerrycan (those are jerrycans in the back of Mzee’s truck above). Cooking, clothes washing, bathing, teeth brushing, etc. must all be planned in advance from the available water. Now you realize why the Swahili word for jerrycan was one of the first 100 words we learned. For those not lucky enough to live near a well, they have to either gather the water (usually the job of the wife or female children) or pay for it to be delivered in a jerrycan. Below is a picture of the water delivery cart:



None of this running water, however, is potable for us or for Mary. Some Kenyans do drink water straight from wells but they often boil their water too in order to avoid some of the water-borne diseases that are so devastating to developing counties. Cholera and typhoid might be things you’ve only heard about on the Oregon Trail video game but they’re very real here. Our drinking water comes from the well in Msambweni (Mzee Mungai thinks the water is too salty from the well in Diani). It is then boiled by Lucy and strained before being deposited in the refrigerator to be cooled for drinking.

All this processing results in far less water use and wastage than in the US. According to a book I just read about water use (yes, I know I’m weird), the average American uses over 550 liters of water per day while the average Kenyan uses about 55 liters (a little over 13 gallons, a typical showerhead uses between 5 and 8 gallons per minute). The UN suggests that people need at least 50 liters of water per day for their basic subsistence requirements but this number does not even include the amount people need for growing crops or raising livestock. So you can see that the average Kenyan isn’t living on very much water.

There are obvious impacts of the labor intensive water processing. First, water usage is not taken lightly since you’re sharing a limited supply with a household. If one of us fills his or her bottle too much, there is not enough for others. Second, you don’t make an off-hand request for water in someone’s home. This is a precious resource that they have to boil and prepare so you don’t ask for water unless you’re really thirsty. Third, you carry your own water with you everywhere since you can’t always trust the water processing. I took a course of Cipro last week after drinking some school tap water so I learned my lesson!

The other day, the pipe broke on the water to my school and it was chaos. The taps didn’t work (so no hand-washing), the toilets didn’t work (so no flushing the toilet holes used by 70 people), and there was one jerrycan of water (about 5 gallons) to be shared by 70 people in 95 degrees for 8 hours. I couldn’t help but imagine the rural schools where this is the reality every single day.

Water security, like food security, is not a given in Kenya (especially the poorer Western regions). The other day in church, people stood to share thanksgivings and one women stood to be thankful that “we all have food to eat and water to drink because there are people in Turkana who don’t (in Western Kenya)”. It’s very humbling to think about all the water wastage in the US, and how few people in the US would ever think to be thankful for water.