Today’s blog post is about water.

Water, water, nowhere.

The national energy supplier in Madagascar is Jirama. Unfortunately, when things break in the bush, Jirama are pretty slow to fix them (read: weeks – months) and sometimes don’t bother at all. Mandritsara relies on an electric pump to bring its water pump to the village. Most local folks get their water by queuing at one of the communal taps in town. About two weeks ago now, something blew in a generator not far from here (please note my highly technical explanation. Effectively, something broke, and this was not good). The result of which was that there was only an hour or two of power a day, and also therefore there was only an hour or two of water per day.

This is a bit rubbish when you only have an hour to fill or your buckets for the next day from the tap in your house, but imagine if you’re a local person who’s waiting in line at the communal taps. You’re about eighty people deep in the queue, and you know that in the hour that there’s water, you’ll get nowhere near the front of the queue. You’ll have to wait in the queue until this time tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow you’ll get some, maybe not. Then disaster strikes. Jirama decide that rather than thinking about repairing the broken thing, they’re going to just cut off all power supply, and thus all water, to the village. You have no water left.

This is the situation that the village is in at the moment. There has been no water for three days. The rivers are completely dried out. People are digging deep into the riverbeds to find any trickle of water, but nothing.

At the hospital, we are lucky. We have a water tower. It’s only 16 metres deep though, which is quite shallow. It certainly can’t cope with the full demands of the hospital and also the missionary families who live in the grounds. So we have a rationing system. For all but two hours per day, the water tower is shut off. At 4.30pm, the rationing starts, and each hospital department / house gets a 15 minute time in which to turn their taps on and fill as many buckets as they can find, to last the next 24 hours. This is because the tower can only really deal with one tap on at a time, because of the poor pressure. From 18.45 until 19.00 there is a military operation by which I fill a barrel with buckets in a relay system, and not a drop is wasted.

I’m learning to wash with 2 litres, and to then reuse that water afterwards to flush the.... The water is full of bugs and beasties. We have a filter to filter some drinking water, and we’re so thankful to have access to drinking water. Meanwhile the sun is beating down, and we have pretty huge insensible losses to replace as well as what we’d normally drink. Anything apart from absolutely essential hygiene is kept to a minimum, to save as much water as we can.

We have no idea if or when Jirama will fix the situation in the village. Last night we heard that the local Jirama manager was hunted down by the local people; some say he was gravely injured, others say he was killed. It’s not clear yet what happened, but what is clear, is that people are utterly desperate.

Meanwhile, diarrhoeal illnesses have seen a huge rise. People have no water to wash their hands. They’re drinking anything they can find. Once they get ill, they’ve got no water to keep themselves clean and wash their hands, so it spreads. It’s been hitting the hospital staff too – we’re trying to wash our hands as much as possible, but equally we’re not entirely sure that the filters are entirely cleaning the murky, slightly stagnant water from our barrels.

Operations are becoming less sterile – it’s tough when you’re trying to scrub with someone pouring a bucket of water over your hands – water that is full of bugs and certainly not all that clean. We just can’t filter enough water, and so the filtered water gets rationed for priorities such as drinking.

I am learning to appreciate clean running water in a whole new way. Last week I was moaning about the bucket situation; this week I am just so thankful that I have access to a bucket of water.

The situation in the village is dire. Most local folks use no electricity anyway, or maybe just one light bulb, so they’re less bothered about the lack of electricity. But with each continuing day that they have no access to water, things worsen exponentially.

We sit and wait, and pray, knowing that our God is faithful.