Water: An Essential!

A page from my scrapbook

In Chapter 2 of Grandma’s Letters from Africa, I wrote that in Maasai-land during the second phase of orientation, our water came from a stream a few inches deep and maybe fifteen feet wide.

Maasai bathed in it, washed their laundry in it, and herded cattle through it.

Other wild animals splashed around in it, too, and baboons up in the trees pooped into it.

I also used water from that muddy little stream to hand-scrub our laundry.

To get laundry water, you’ll see in the top picture that I tied a rope to a plastic bucket, lowered it down the bank and into the brook, then pulled water up. Because the stream was so shallow, I could get only a few inches of water in the bucket at a time.

In the bottom picture, I used the enormous roots of a fig tree as a table for the wash basin.

That stream was also the source of our drinking water.

What?!? you might gasp.

Have no fear! We set up water-filter systems that removed microorganisms that cause diarrhea, vomiting, typhoid, and other illnesses.

We set up our gravity-fed filter system with half a dozen red plastic barrels, rubber tubing, and ceramic filters. Those filters, called candles, looked like rolling pins without handles.

We immersed them into a barrel of dirty water that, in a few minutes, passed through the slightly porous ceramic. In the process, that murky water turned clear and pure and it came out through rubber tubing.

A crew of people cleaned the candles on a regular basis because slime from the brook built up on them.

Water! It’s essential for living!

Safe drinking water is essential for health

and, by God’s grace,

we had both there in the desert.

That was a cause for sincere rejoicing and thanksgiving.