Why Water

My friend and brother in Christ Mark Traphagen and his wife, Karyn, recently went to the Sudan to teach and be taught. [Mark and Karyn are both seminarians, so they can help teach the teachers at some level.]

One thing that caught me, once I got to thinking about it, was a comment Mark made about how residents of Yei go about their daily lives:

In town, the compounds are tightly packed together in neighborhoods of sorts, with narrow alleyways throughout. Since there is no running water, one constantly sees women or children coming from the river or wells with 20-liter jerry cans, often balanced on their heads.

Okay … math time. 20 L is 5.283 US gal. The US standard for flushing a toilet used to be 3.5 gallons per flush; nowadays, it’s 1.8 gpf. [Of course, it's not as if you have flush toilets in the traditional sense when you're carrying water on your head.]

So, the residents of Yei are carrying a couple toilet flushes around town on their heads. I’ll probably flush a toilet five times today. That’s two trips to a well with one of those jerry cans on my head. How heavy is that? Water’s density at the temperatures and pressures we see is 1g/cm³. One liter is 1000 cubic centimers, so that jerry can is full of 20 kg of water, or 44 pounds of water.

Here in the states, potable water [much less waste water] just isn’t that big of a deal. We’ve invested lots of money in waste water treatment facilities. But in developing nations, like what we see in Africa, this isn’t feasible yet. If you start thinking about your water usage in terms of how many of those jerry cans you’d have to carry a couple miles from the well to your house, you’d start wanting a well of your own, wouldn’t you?

What if it wasn’t just a couple of miles?

1000 wells is just a start. More on that later today.