Waterless World

UPDATE 4:45PM - The parish doesn't have running water either. Who knows what we do now.

We don't have running water.

We haven't had water since Sunday night, when a pipe in town exploded. Yesterday, most of our neighbors got water back, but our sector of Andahuaylillas is still waterless. How do the JVs in the Mountain House deal with such a situation - we depend on the parish.

The parish has massive water tanks which means that even when there is no water from the municipality, the parish still has running water. Since most of the volunteers in our house work at the parish, we are allowed to bring buckets over and fill them up. The walk back is no picnic. It helps to consider it an exercise instead of a chore.

As a result of this change in water sources, we...

• Wash dishes like we're camping. We soap everything up and then double rinse it. Once in a bucket of just water, and the second time in a bucket of bleach water.
• Flush the toilets when the smell of eight people's urine mixing together gets to be too much. (We've been pooping at the parish. Pooping in Peru is always more interesting than it is in the States). We have 4 toilets that we use, so the smell isn't as bad as it could be. But we aren't flushing every time because one flush uses up 1.6 gallons of water (check your toilet at home, that's a pretty standard thing). That's a lot of water, probably more than you need for anything except the most impressive of poops. Flushing our 4 toilets once each uses about 6 and a half gallons of water. No one wants to carry that much water back and forth more than once a day. 
• Use iodine tablets to purify the water for drinking. We do this anyways, but it's more of a process when you are poring from a bucket into a jug than when the water is coming in a small stream from a faucet.
• Shower at the parish's retreat house. Like I said, they have water, and also have a hot water heater, so showers can be hot. I actually bucket showered just before we learned that the parish would let us use their showers. 

We have no sense of how long it could be before the water is flowing in our pipes again. So it's bucket carrying for the immediate future. 

Actually, it's almost time for Jacq to Skype someone, so I should leave the computer room and give her privacy. I think I'll use the bathroom here at the parish and then fill up some buckets to take home with me. Wish me luck!