Water

There is a scene in the Disney animated movie Tarzan where Tarzan’s elephant friend cautiously dips his toe into the river and with a wheezy little voice asks his mother and the other elephants, “Are you sure this water’s sanitary?”

The answer is no. No, the water is not sanitary. 99% of the time, the water, or more specifically whatever is living in the water, wants to viciously murder you by living inside your intestines and leeching off your body as a type of life source until either you die or force the intruder out via medications or, for lack of more elegant terminology, the human waste system located on both the northern and southern hemisphere of your body.

Access to potable drinking water has been a luxury of my entire life. Maine has, definitively I might add, the best water in the world when you consider taste, purity, and the amount of minerals contained in its little droplets. That being said, I was spoiled growing up with the best water in the world coming right out of my tap in the kitchen, providing us with safe, clean, and trustworthy liquid with which to hydrate ourselves.

That’s not the case in most of the world, even in most places in the United States, and it is certainly not true here in Madagascar where lack of water is a major problem on regional and sometimes national scales. This is mostly due to poor infrastructure. The bottom line is that safe drinking water is hard to come by in Madagascar, and for the majority of the population who cannot afford the means to either purchase safe water or distill it themselves, they simply run the risk of getting sick or just living with an unwanted hitchhiker in their intestines.

So why is water dangerous? Well it’s not really the water. It’s what lives inside the water. In tropical places, things like viruses and parasites more easily thrive due to the warmer and humid climate. Malaria, for instance, is actually a parasite that lives inside a mosquito and makes its way to humans only after incubating inside a mosquito for 9-ish days and then the mosquito biting someone. But for other viruses and parasites, they typically live in water or dirt where it is safe for such monsters to live.

Now I must console you that I do have access to various ways of obtaining safe drinking water. The first and easiest way is simply to buy bottled water, which is easy enough to come by in large stores and even small street vendors, granted you make sure the bottle has not been opened. We typically get 1-2 6-packs of 2-liter bottles every time we go to the store. And this, so far, has seemed to work out well.

The other way of obtaining safe water is by purifying it ourselves. There are a few ways to do it with chemicals and other filtration devices, but the surest and safest way is to boil it. Yeah, believe it or not, most things can’t survive boiling temperatures. So the process goes something like this: fill both pots with water, turn on stove, wait for water to boil, boil water for at least 1min, let cool for about an hour so it doesn’t melt your bottles, pour water into old water bottles, add a pinch of salt, toss in the refrigerator. And there you have it, safe water. It’s as bland tasting as you might think it sounds, but at least it’s safe. Megan and I like to call it our homemade water but mostly use it to wash our vegetables.

Details like this open my eyes to blessings I didn’t always recognize I had. I knew to an extent, theoretically one might say, that I have been blessed with such things. But when you are thrown into the mix of it all where nothing is certain and people are just trying to survive one day at a time, it puts a different perspective in your mind, what Steven Covey would call a paradigm shift.

Nothing sobers the heart quite like a physical experience of a reality once held only in the mind as theory and perspective. Yet, this uncertainty about water and the terrible things that come about because of it is how the majority of humanity has lived for nearly all of our history. How we survived to this point, with relative joy in many things, is not so much a mystery as it is a testament to the collaboration between man’s natural reason and the grace and love of God. That grace touches each of our hearts, whether we recognize it or not, and the extent we respond to that grace, is the extent to which the Lord can work miracles, even tiny ones, through us. If nothing else, the water situation here should spark in us not necessarily sorrow, but rather compassion and empathy; and, moreover, a profound sense of gratitude, a virtue we so desperately need in the United States and is a cornerstone of finding true joy.

I don’t think I will ever forget the image of a little girl filling her plastic water bottle from a drainpipe, from which only God knows is the source of that liquid. Or that of the long lines of people holding yellow containers at water stations where the water supply is not always guaranteed let alone safe. Or that of the little boy drinking out of a bottle of some hazy liquid obviously contaminated with something or browned with dirt, or perhaps from the open sewage no more than 5ft away. No, I don’t think those images will ever leave me, for they are not infrequent here. And I’m not sure I want them to leave anyways. It makes you stop and think differently. It makes you pray differently. It makes you believe differently. Well, as always, know that you are in my prayers each morning. All I ask is that you do the same for me.

May God be praised.