Water, water
I’ve never been very good about sticking to schedules, especially with housework, but the last few months I’ve done pretty well at washing the sheets and towels on Fridays. So I was disappointed to discover the water was off this morning, and as if to put a complete kibosh on my laundry plans, it’s been drizzling.
We’re lucky here at the bottom of the town, because when the water goes out we still usually get a trickle for a while. So I was able to fill a bucket for the toilet and a pitcher for the kitchen sink before it disappeared completely.
Interruptions in the water supply are fairly frequent in Mexico. The best solution is to have a Rotoplas, one of those plastic water tanks, on the roof. In areas where there are chronic water shortages, water tanks are indispensable. In Progreso, Yucatan, there was never enough water for it to run during the day; everyone’s Rotoplas filled up a drop at a time overnight. Here, however, it doesn’t happen too often. Although we made a spot for a Rotoplas when we rebuilt the house, we ran out of money long before the time came to buy one.
The worst thing about the water cutoffs is being caught unprepared. I start feeling dirty and sticky and envisioning germs crawling all over everything the minute I know the water’s gone. And not knowing when it will come back on — will I be able to make dinner (the big event of the day)? We could go out for tacos of course, but for the thought that they don’t have water either…
Some kind of santizer is good to have around. I use cheap rum in a spray bottle for hand cleaning during water outages. We also use it to clean the tops of water bottles before putting them on the dispenser.
One suffocating August morning a couple years ago the water went out early in the morning and showed no signs of coming back as the day dragged on. We had nothing but the spray bottle of rum and paper towels and became more miserable with each passing hour. At about 3 p.m. a thunderstorm arrived. We spent a couple minutes regretting the irony of all that water in the air and none in the faucets, before noticing streams of it pouring off our now-clean truck, and scrambled to get every container we could find under there to collect it, laughing hysterically and getting blissfully soaked in the surprisingly cold downpour.
I was amazed at the amount of water we collected in our small assortment of pots, pans, and buckets. Enough to flush the toilet and wash for days! But of course we never got to use most of it — the water came back on about an hour after the storm ended.