When I was living at home and then in the dorms at college I never thought twice about wasting energy or water. At home my parents were paying for it and then in the college dorms it was included in the cost of the room. Junior year I moved into my first apartment with my buddies and we had to pay for the utilities. My roommate Chris, aka Cdogg, had lived in an apartment the year before so he was already good at being efficient but I wasn’t. He was always reprimanding me for forgetting to turn the light off in the bathroom or turning off the tv, that I always had too loud for our little apartment, when I fell asleep on the couch with my shoes on.
Then I lived with Matt, aka Magnum. Matt is a conservationist. He donates to the Sierra club enough to get free address labels from them and tries his best to make an urban garden. After living with Chris I thought I was pretty good at turning out the lights, but I had to improve in order to make Matt happy. Matt didn’t use the dishwasher and he turned the thermostat down even though our gas was covered by the landlord who still charged us too much. I even found myself taking up Matt’s cause the next year when I was getting angry at JB, aka Josh, for leaving lights on and I was a jerk when I yelled at him for using his space heater the one day when it was like 60 out.
I am very happy to have electricity here in Rwanda and I think that I am in the minority for that category. Chris and Matt prepared me for my energy situation here because electricity is on a prepaid system. If I use too much I gotta go to the store pay to load more power.
Nothing however prepared me for not having running water. It seems kinda backwards to have electricity but not water. The ancient Romans and Persians had running water. Piping is a lot harder to install than wiring though so I understand why it is like this. What I do have is gutter on my roof that leads to a cistern. Our cistern’s water level has consistently been getting lower since I moved in, and I recently realized that most of the water collected by the gutter doesn’t make it to cistern because of some leaks in the gutter. So what I started doing is when it rains I put buckets under the leaks to collect more of the water. Yesterday I put the buckets out and collected a lot of water in them and then today it rained for about eight hours. I was able to fill up all of our containers completely. I also started doing the dishes using the water leaking from the gutter. It was almost like having a sink. While I was doing this it reminded me of an argument I had with another roommate from last year, Eric aka Jackhammer. We argued over how I used a sponge on the floor and he considered this to be unsanitary and I said it doesn’t matter because the soap is what cleans the dishes no matter how disgusting the sponges are. It seems like such a dumb argument looking back on it. We both must have been having a bad day. I wonder how Eric would feel about the way I do dishes here. I use the same soap that we use for laundry, and the water just came off of the dirty tin roof. I think Matt would be proud though because even though our water was paid for last year he still would stop up the sink and use it as a basin in order to save water while I would just let the water run and admittedly use a lot more that I needed. But using cold water when it was warmer out didn’t bother me.
When we were in training they told us some crazy statistic about how Rwandans only use one liter of water a day or something like that. It sounded made up at the time and I have come to the conclusion that it isn’t because they are conscientious of how much water they use. It is because a lot of them don’t have the collection systems/water connection to have enough water to be wasteful. Also showers are pretty rare; I bathe out of a bucket about twice a week. I have come to this conclusion because I have a maid named Charlotte. She cooks and cleans for us and we pay her about twelve dollars a month and that is after a raise from the previous month when we paid her more like eight. I have watched her use our water and she makes no effort to conserve it. I feel like I have to refill our jugs anytime I want to use them because she always leaves them empty. She is nice and a single mother who lives at her parent’s house and brings her baby to work with her, but her baby’s crying is annoying and she breast feeds her right in front of me, and Devin is suspicious that she is stealing cooking oil from us.
I believe that Americans are wasteful, but it is really because we have the availability of resources and not because we are necessarily more wasteful than Rwandans or other cultures. It is like when a dog gets its hands on a bag of candy. The dog is going to keep eating the candy until it is sick and then it will start vomiting everywhere and will probably follow that by eating the vomit. Even though we do not eat vomit we are the same way because we will continue to use what we think we want until it ends up costing too much(the cost includes things other than money) and then keep using it.
That is it for my village as far as water collection goes. I’m sure they have something else at the tea factory though because they need water there too.
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