Chapter 1: Really Really Thirsty
“You rip off a chunk, like a small piece, and turn it over between your fingers and pinch the food you want to pick up with the piece so you don’t get germs on your food.”
“But you are holding the tortilla.”
“But the tortillas are clean.”
“How can that be true? An old lady whose hands are all gross, who has no water to wash them, rolling the dough around in her palms before they go on the heated steel plate that hasn’t been washed ever, and heated just until warm.”
“No…” and then he did this thing where he laughs once loud, buckles over and hits his knee with his fist. You don’t know if he is angry or happy until he comes up with a huge smile, face red from laughing at you. This was the first time I saw it. “Ok. Take the piece and eat your tuna. There is no other food, so just eat. Next time you can buy bread instead and have it all be clean. OK, now, if you want to eat a taco, you take your tortilla and put it in your hand like you think you would. Scoop the tuna in with that chunk of tortilla you previously ripped off, and there you go. Oh! You only hold it with one hand. That’s the Mexican way.”
It was in those first days that Kike and I both realized that we either had to quickly become best friends or it was going to be an incredibly taxing, difficult situation. So we had to make bad jokes, explain them slowly and loudly with small words, repeat them a couple times, and then laugh helping the other person see where to laugh.
Food was a trick, and one of the things that helped bring us together. I poked fun at the meager meals we ate, laughing and asking about the food and manner of eating, the cultural things that he never thought about. We would go buy handmade tortillas and tuna fish, or just fruit and bread, or buy some small homemade meal from the neighbors. We would scoop the tuna out of the can, or whatever we were eating, and onto the warm tortillas. I told him it was some of the most boring meals I had ever eaten. He told me I was in for a lot more boring meals. He taught me to eat with tortillas.
“Eating it with one hand? That’s what you guys have for traditions around here?”
“Do you want to be Mexican or not?”
“Fine, fine.”
We eat what we have. Actually after a few meals like this, you begin to be thankful for what you have and not griping about what you wish you had.
The tuna is gone but there are still two tortillas left.
“Ok. I get one, you get one.”
“What?”
“Eat your tortilla. I am eating mine.”
“You don’t have to eat the last tortillas. You always buy more than you need. If you find more food, you can put it in the tortilla and eat it. But right now we don’t have anything else.”
“Listen, there are starving children in China right now and you have more than you need. Eat your tortilla.” I am laughing eating my tortilla plain. Kike makes this face like he can’t believe I am eating a plain tortilla, but he laughs and puts some salt in his and does likewise.
Of course I am just paraphrasing what actually took many sentences to get out. He had to repeat himself, and I had to talk slowly, thinking of words, and come up with completely original creative ways to work around words I didn’t know.
We made a pact that night: he cooks, I wash the dishes. I was terrified of throwing the tortillas around over the live gas flame, and he couldn’t navigate his way down to the wash basin very easily, so it worked out great. He just sat there and smoked a cigarette and we chatted.
“You smoke?”
“No.” I’m answering. “You?”
“No.” He throws down his cigarette.
“Cool. I mean, not that I care...” He pulled out a pad of paper and a pencil from the backpack he had kept on the back of his chair since that morning. He started to draw. I had seen him paint the ceramic plates and bowls and salt shakers before, and I knew that he had an incredibly steady hand. I figured that simply meant he was a good artist, with plenty of practice. It turns out I was right. He drew for five minutes, and had a graffiti impression of me washing dishes. I laughed. I was a stereotype, but then again how else was he going to draw me?
“I love sitting out here watching the stars. When the moon is out, it is even nicer.” He takes a deep breath, putting his hand on his chest. He shrugs and wiggles his chair back and forth. My hands are freezing from washing the dishes.
“Before you came I would just sit out here and not do anything. Just by myself. I didn’t mind it, but it got so boring. I loved it when people came up to visit. I love it when we fire ceramics because sometimes Leti and Osve come up and stay until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. Israel comes up with tacos for dinner and we chat.”
“Did you hear that mouse in our room?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what there is to eat in our room though.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“Not really. It’s not like there are a lot of places to hide. I’ll ask them to bring us a trap tomorrow. It’s pretty easy.”
There is just a huge basin of water that I just want to dump all the dishes into and wash in that. But you have to put the dishes to one side, where there is a drain and pull water with a bowl or something out of the basin and splash it over the dishes. You then grab a sponge and scrub them down with soap. Then more water scooped out of the tank. It takes me forever to get all the soap off the dishes. I am scooping and scooping. Finally I just pile them up, hands red from the cold, and bring them up to the kitchen.
The next night I bought instant soups (although without a microwave, not so instant), and taught him how to use chopsticks (I had brought two pairs for fun). He ended up eating it with tortillas anyway, and I ended up with a fork.
A couple days later, the handyman Davíd called me to go help him. I didn’t understand what was going on, but suddenly we had two pieces of four-meter rebar that we were attempting to connect by bending the ends, through the means of banging it curved with a hammer. We ended up getting them satisfactorily hooked, and used some wire to make sure they were somewhat together in a now almost eight meter rod that I still didn’t understand. We took it out to the back forty (which was really like back “half”) and made our way along the ancient stone wall that used to house so much more 200 years ago. There sat a cement water basin that held probably a couple hundred liters of water. It came from the stream that came down the hill. I looked up and saw that the stream came down between two houses that were remarkably close together for having a stream between them, and above that water spilling out of a pipe that poked out from under the thin curving road, so the water wouldn’t flow over the road. Still further up was another similar basin that allowed for a large amount of spillage, and above that somehow an actual stream again winding it’s way through houses and trees. It was easy to follow just watching the heavy vegetation that wound its way up the hill amongst barren land filled with cactus and rocks.
It appeared that there was a concrete pipe about five inches in diameter that lead out of the side of the basin, into the ground, and then a few feet passed and it reappeared again. At that point there is a plastic tube, just a little bit smaller in diameter, shoved into the end of the concrete one.
“What’s this?”
“Where the water goes.”
“Our water?”
“Yes. Did you think we get our water from the channel?”
I physically shudder at the thought and Davíd laughs. The channel of course is a man made waterway that runs pretty much directly under my room, and out the other side of Las Rosas. It runs horizontally along the hill, bring water from the reservoir above the hill down and then laterally from South to North. There are big “keys” as the call them which are the irrigation gates that are opened a few times a year to let water flood down the hill and onto the plain, watering the corn. After the gates are opened, it floods down the land uncontrolled unless some farmer guides it by digging ditches. The water in the channel starts clean, but the channel is so filth, we have often discussed how you should carry a knife with you so that if you were ever to accidentally fall in, you could kill yourself quickly and not have to agonize through it. We see dead dogs or sheep floating around, the whole bottom lined with garbage, and crazy sorts of bacteria filled plants. No animal besides the water snakes we occasionally see would possibly survive here.
We spend about ten minutes pulling on the plastic tube, trying to dislodge it from inside the cement female end. It comes off with a pop, and water spouts out. The pressure quickly fades until it is nothing more than a dribble falling off the end. We look inside, but we can see nothing but black. I reach my arm up into it, and pull out a few large rocks, but surely nothing jammed that would have plugged the water.
I step back and finally see what the rebar is for. We pick it up and with me at the back start to negotiate it in. We get like three meters of our eight into the pipe before we hit something. We start to ram the thing in there. We give it a couple good knocks before we back up and give it a running start. It isn’t like a rock, it is like something soft with a little give that we are hitting but can’t pull out or push in farther. We need a fishhook to get past whatever is in there and yank it out. But all we have is rebar so we keep going at it. We actually get the rebar past the blockage and far enough past that it comes out the other end up into the basin. We pull it back out, black guck coming out, like leaves and stuff, but nothing solid. Each time we get an influx flow of water, but it quickly decreases and runs out again.
I went up to the basin to check things out. First of all I noticed that clothes were hung over the walls of the basin, not quite touching the water. So laundry is clearly washed in here before it makes its way down to our showers and sinks. I start to walk above and see garbage sitting on the sides of the stream. There are a lot of wrappers, bottles, and even a diaper. Yuck. That is there right above, or in, our water source. Not that we drink it, but I certainly wasn’t going to want to brush my teeth in that anymore. Man, that’s gross. I shudder again, and David laughs again, assuming I am thinking about the channel still. I am not.
I walk back down and Davíd is trying to bang a hook into the end of the rebar, to make it a wider stab into the pipe. We get it up and going again, working away at whatever is inside it. We probably toil there another fifteen minutes before we catch the clog, and give a few tough yanks, pulling it free. The water now flows, as we pull the rest of the rebar out. Out come two bags, both filled with now crunched plastic pop, detergent, and bleach bottles. We sit there, watching the water flow into the field below. We let it go a while, flushing out some more garbage, and reconnect the plastic tube.
We head back, and I go inspect the water system. It seems that in order for water to get into the bathroom, it has to be pulled from the water line through an electric pump, that goes into an underground reservoir, which is just under the classroom actually. It’s like a good swimming pool lane in width and pretty far back. There is a ladder down into it, so I could swim around if I wanted to. But the lid is only like a foot and a half across, so it would be kind of scary. So anyway, the idea is that if there is solid material in the water, it would just flow on through the system, into the channel with most of the water that goes through. But if we wanted water, it would be pumped out, in theory through some sort of wire screens or something inside the pump, into the reservoir. But when I open the door to the reservoir, a fat frog that was swimming at the surface sees me and dives down. Great.
I continue to follow the line, which appears to need yet another pump to pump it from there up into a tank on the roof. The line pulls water from the tank about half way down, so if there is garbage or animals, hopefully it is floating or has sunk, not getting sucked into the hose. And then from the cement tank on the roof, uses gravity to flow into the bathroom or the hose.
So it was somewhat poetic injustice that that day was the day that we ran out of drinking water in Las Rosas. Kike and I ate dinner without anything to drink, and finally went up to buy water from the tienda just up the road.
The next night we realize that we forgot to get drinking water again. Usually the water guy comes once or twice a week, but we haven’t seen him for a while now. And I forget to pick up water in town. Again, we go to the tienda. The next day the same thing happens, except there is no water at the tienda. Apparently, the water guy hasn’t been up for over two weeks and no one has water. I balk at the idea of the water guy not coming around, and don’t buy water in town, thinking about carrying that huge jug of water up the road twenty minutes. But again there is no water.
The fifth night we are dying of thirst. No one on the hill has water to buy from. Oh, and amusingly enough, we also run out of gas that day to cook with, and the gas man hasn’t been around for a while either.
So we are out there, me washing dishes and him cursing his physical ineptitude to stop pouring deadly smoke into the part of his body which hates it so much than all the other parts, dying of thirst.
“We don’t have water, we can’t buy water, and we can’t boil water. We are so stupid. Why don’t I just bite the bullet and haul that garrafon up here?”
“I can’t handle this. I am so thirsty. I won’t be able to sleep tonight I am so thirsty. We haven’t drank water in like two or three days. We have had pop, but that is just making it worse. I need water.”
And so, much like a Braveheart slow motion shot, I look up at him and nod, knowing what must be done. What must be done in the name of survival. Trumpets blast the death march, or the Imperial Theme or something, as I set down the dishes I am washing and walk up the stairs to meet him at the kitchen door, wifes and kids crying and holding out their hands. I pause, and then enter, picking up two plastic glasses. We do an about face and walk back outside. We stride towards the bathroom entrance, not saying anything, both knowing what is about to come.
Noooooo!!!!!
I go to the sink, and drop my head in defeat as I turn on the faucet. I fill both cups up, and set them next to each other on the counter. I look at Kike, thinking of my past, non-diarrheal, youth. We each take a cup and stare into the water. I dump mine out and fill it up again. It looks the same. There is nothing floating, but your eyes can for the first time actually see batrillions of microorganisms chomping their large teeth and doing unmentionable things inside the water. I grimace and say: “well, if I’m going to be sick, so are you.” And with that we both down the entire glass of water.
For the rest of the night we start to feel sick. At least every twenty minutes someone says “I think I’m feeling sick.”
We both woke up the next morning fine.
“But you are holding the tortilla.”
“But the tortillas are clean.”
“How can that be true? An old lady whose hands are all gross, who has no water to wash them, rolling the dough around in her palms before they go on the heated steel plate that hasn’t been washed ever, and heated just until warm.”
“No…” and then he did this thing where he laughs once loud, buckles over and hits his knee with his fist. You don’t know if he is angry or happy until he comes up with a huge smile, face red from laughing at you. This was the first time I saw it. “Ok. Take the piece and eat your tuna. There is no other food, so just eat. Next time you can buy bread instead and have it all be clean. OK, now, if you want to eat a taco, you take your tortilla and put it in your hand like you think you would. Scoop the tuna in with that chunk of tortilla you previously ripped off, and there you go. Oh! You only hold it with one hand. That’s the Mexican way.”
It was in those first days that Kike and I both realized that we either had to quickly become best friends or it was going to be an incredibly taxing, difficult situation. So we had to make bad jokes, explain them slowly and loudly with small words, repeat them a couple times, and then laugh helping the other person see where to laugh.
Food was a trick, and one of the things that helped bring us together. I poked fun at the meager meals we ate, laughing and asking about the food and manner of eating, the cultural things that he never thought about. We would go buy handmade tortillas and tuna fish, or just fruit and bread, or buy some small homemade meal from the neighbors. We would scoop the tuna out of the can, or whatever we were eating, and onto the warm tortillas. I told him it was some of the most boring meals I had ever eaten. He told me I was in for a lot more boring meals. He taught me to eat with tortillas.
“Eating it with one hand? That’s what you guys have for traditions around here?”
“Do you want to be Mexican or not?”
“Fine, fine.”
We eat what we have. Actually after a few meals like this, you begin to be thankful for what you have and not griping about what you wish you had.
The tuna is gone but there are still two tortillas left.
“Ok. I get one, you get one.”
“What?”
“Eat your tortilla. I am eating mine.”
“You don’t have to eat the last tortillas. You always buy more than you need. If you find more food, you can put it in the tortilla and eat it. But right now we don’t have anything else.”
“Listen, there are starving children in China right now and you have more than you need. Eat your tortilla.” I am laughing eating my tortilla plain. Kike makes this face like he can’t believe I am eating a plain tortilla, but he laughs and puts some salt in his and does likewise.
Of course I am just paraphrasing what actually took many sentences to get out. He had to repeat himself, and I had to talk slowly, thinking of words, and come up with completely original creative ways to work around words I didn’t know.
We made a pact that night: he cooks, I wash the dishes. I was terrified of throwing the tortillas around over the live gas flame, and he couldn’t navigate his way down to the wash basin very easily, so it worked out great. He just sat there and smoked a cigarette and we chatted.
“You smoke?”
“No.” I’m answering. “You?”
“No.” He throws down his cigarette.
“Cool. I mean, not that I care...” He pulled out a pad of paper and a pencil from the backpack he had kept on the back of his chair since that morning. He started to draw. I had seen him paint the ceramic plates and bowls and salt shakers before, and I knew that he had an incredibly steady hand. I figured that simply meant he was a good artist, with plenty of practice. It turns out I was right. He drew for five minutes, and had a graffiti impression of me washing dishes. I laughed. I was a stereotype, but then again how else was he going to draw me?
“I love sitting out here watching the stars. When the moon is out, it is even nicer.” He takes a deep breath, putting his hand on his chest. He shrugs and wiggles his chair back and forth. My hands are freezing from washing the dishes.
“Before you came I would just sit out here and not do anything. Just by myself. I didn’t mind it, but it got so boring. I loved it when people came up to visit. I love it when we fire ceramics because sometimes Leti and Osve come up and stay until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. Israel comes up with tacos for dinner and we chat.”
“Did you hear that mouse in our room?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what there is to eat in our room though.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“Not really. It’s not like there are a lot of places to hide. I’ll ask them to bring us a trap tomorrow. It’s pretty easy.”
There is just a huge basin of water that I just want to dump all the dishes into and wash in that. But you have to put the dishes to one side, where there is a drain and pull water with a bowl or something out of the basin and splash it over the dishes. You then grab a sponge and scrub them down with soap. Then more water scooped out of the tank. It takes me forever to get all the soap off the dishes. I am scooping and scooping. Finally I just pile them up, hands red from the cold, and bring them up to the kitchen.
The next night I bought instant soups (although without a microwave, not so instant), and taught him how to use chopsticks (I had brought two pairs for fun). He ended up eating it with tortillas anyway, and I ended up with a fork.
A couple days later, the handyman Davíd called me to go help him. I didn’t understand what was going on, but suddenly we had two pieces of four-meter rebar that we were attempting to connect by bending the ends, through the means of banging it curved with a hammer. We ended up getting them satisfactorily hooked, and used some wire to make sure they were somewhat together in a now almost eight meter rod that I still didn’t understand. We took it out to the back forty (which was really like back “half”) and made our way along the ancient stone wall that used to house so much more 200 years ago. There sat a cement water basin that held probably a couple hundred liters of water. It came from the stream that came down the hill. I looked up and saw that the stream came down between two houses that were remarkably close together for having a stream between them, and above that water spilling out of a pipe that poked out from under the thin curving road, so the water wouldn’t flow over the road. Still further up was another similar basin that allowed for a large amount of spillage, and above that somehow an actual stream again winding it’s way through houses and trees. It was easy to follow just watching the heavy vegetation that wound its way up the hill amongst barren land filled with cactus and rocks.
It appeared that there was a concrete pipe about five inches in diameter that lead out of the side of the basin, into the ground, and then a few feet passed and it reappeared again. At that point there is a plastic tube, just a little bit smaller in diameter, shoved into the end of the concrete one.
“What’s this?”
“Where the water goes.”
“Our water?”
“Yes. Did you think we get our water from the channel?”
I physically shudder at the thought and Davíd laughs. The channel of course is a man made waterway that runs pretty much directly under my room, and out the other side of Las Rosas. It runs horizontally along the hill, bring water from the reservoir above the hill down and then laterally from South to North. There are big “keys” as the call them which are the irrigation gates that are opened a few times a year to let water flood down the hill and onto the plain, watering the corn. After the gates are opened, it floods down the land uncontrolled unless some farmer guides it by digging ditches. The water in the channel starts clean, but the channel is so filth, we have often discussed how you should carry a knife with you so that if you were ever to accidentally fall in, you could kill yourself quickly and not have to agonize through it. We see dead dogs or sheep floating around, the whole bottom lined with garbage, and crazy sorts of bacteria filled plants. No animal besides the water snakes we occasionally see would possibly survive here.
We spend about ten minutes pulling on the plastic tube, trying to dislodge it from inside the cement female end. It comes off with a pop, and water spouts out. The pressure quickly fades until it is nothing more than a dribble falling off the end. We look inside, but we can see nothing but black. I reach my arm up into it, and pull out a few large rocks, but surely nothing jammed that would have plugged the water.
I step back and finally see what the rebar is for. We pick it up and with me at the back start to negotiate it in. We get like three meters of our eight into the pipe before we hit something. We start to ram the thing in there. We give it a couple good knocks before we back up and give it a running start. It isn’t like a rock, it is like something soft with a little give that we are hitting but can’t pull out or push in farther. We need a fishhook to get past whatever is in there and yank it out. But all we have is rebar so we keep going at it. We actually get the rebar past the blockage and far enough past that it comes out the other end up into the basin. We pull it back out, black guck coming out, like leaves and stuff, but nothing solid. Each time we get an influx flow of water, but it quickly decreases and runs out again.
I went up to the basin to check things out. First of all I noticed that clothes were hung over the walls of the basin, not quite touching the water. So laundry is clearly washed in here before it makes its way down to our showers and sinks. I start to walk above and see garbage sitting on the sides of the stream. There are a lot of wrappers, bottles, and even a diaper. Yuck. That is there right above, or in, our water source. Not that we drink it, but I certainly wasn’t going to want to brush my teeth in that anymore. Man, that’s gross. I shudder again, and David laughs again, assuming I am thinking about the channel still. I am not.
I walk back down and Davíd is trying to bang a hook into the end of the rebar, to make it a wider stab into the pipe. We get it up and going again, working away at whatever is inside it. We probably toil there another fifteen minutes before we catch the clog, and give a few tough yanks, pulling it free. The water now flows, as we pull the rest of the rebar out. Out come two bags, both filled with now crunched plastic pop, detergent, and bleach bottles. We sit there, watching the water flow into the field below. We let it go a while, flushing out some more garbage, and reconnect the plastic tube.
We head back, and I go inspect the water system. It seems that in order for water to get into the bathroom, it has to be pulled from the water line through an electric pump, that goes into an underground reservoir, which is just under the classroom actually. It’s like a good swimming pool lane in width and pretty far back. There is a ladder down into it, so I could swim around if I wanted to. But the lid is only like a foot and a half across, so it would be kind of scary. So anyway, the idea is that if there is solid material in the water, it would just flow on through the system, into the channel with most of the water that goes through. But if we wanted water, it would be pumped out, in theory through some sort of wire screens or something inside the pump, into the reservoir. But when I open the door to the reservoir, a fat frog that was swimming at the surface sees me and dives down. Great.
I continue to follow the line, which appears to need yet another pump to pump it from there up into a tank on the roof. The line pulls water from the tank about half way down, so if there is garbage or animals, hopefully it is floating or has sunk, not getting sucked into the hose. And then from the cement tank on the roof, uses gravity to flow into the bathroom or the hose.
So it was somewhat poetic injustice that that day was the day that we ran out of drinking water in Las Rosas. Kike and I ate dinner without anything to drink, and finally went up to buy water from the tienda just up the road.
The next night we realize that we forgot to get drinking water again. Usually the water guy comes once or twice a week, but we haven’t seen him for a while now. And I forget to pick up water in town. Again, we go to the tienda. The next day the same thing happens, except there is no water at the tienda. Apparently, the water guy hasn’t been up for over two weeks and no one has water. I balk at the idea of the water guy not coming around, and don’t buy water in town, thinking about carrying that huge jug of water up the road twenty minutes. But again there is no water.
The fifth night we are dying of thirst. No one on the hill has water to buy from. Oh, and amusingly enough, we also run out of gas that day to cook with, and the gas man hasn’t been around for a while either.
So we are out there, me washing dishes and him cursing his physical ineptitude to stop pouring deadly smoke into the part of his body which hates it so much than all the other parts, dying of thirst.
“We don’t have water, we can’t buy water, and we can’t boil water. We are so stupid. Why don’t I just bite the bullet and haul that garrafon up here?”
“I can’t handle this. I am so thirsty. I won’t be able to sleep tonight I am so thirsty. We haven’t drank water in like two or three days. We have had pop, but that is just making it worse. I need water.”
And so, much like a Braveheart slow motion shot, I look up at him and nod, knowing what must be done. What must be done in the name of survival. Trumpets blast the death march, or the Imperial Theme or something, as I set down the dishes I am washing and walk up the stairs to meet him at the kitchen door, wifes and kids crying and holding out their hands. I pause, and then enter, picking up two plastic glasses. We do an about face and walk back outside. We stride towards the bathroom entrance, not saying anything, both knowing what is about to come.
Noooooo!!!!!
I go to the sink, and drop my head in defeat as I turn on the faucet. I fill both cups up, and set them next to each other on the counter. I look at Kike, thinking of my past, non-diarrheal, youth. We each take a cup and stare into the water. I dump mine out and fill it up again. It looks the same. There is nothing floating, but your eyes can for the first time actually see batrillions of microorganisms chomping their large teeth and doing unmentionable things inside the water. I grimace and say: “well, if I’m going to be sick, so are you.” And with that we both down the entire glass of water.
For the rest of the night we start to feel sick. At least every twenty minutes someone says “I think I’m feeling sick.”
We both woke up the next morning fine.
posted by Patrick McEvoy at 12:55 PM
2 Comments:
Great stuff, Pat. We lost our tap water and then our filter last week and went without water for 2 1/2 days after all the bottled water in our part of town was sold out. But it didn't feel nearly that adventurous.
-Brian
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