It was a normal afternoon at site-me sitting in the Casa Materna chatting with the pregnant ladies; one of the doctors from the health center writing down blood pressure, belly measurements, fetal heartrate; the smell of burning trash filling the air-but there was something tense in the atmosphere. A sense of desperate anticipation that had been mounting since the day before had us stiff in our rocking chairs. It was the doctor who first noticed, necessity no doubt lending him superhuman senses, so that he looked up from his paperwork and gasped,¨"viene el agua," before sprinting out of the room to next door where he started yelling for someone to bring him a barrel. I, along with the fastest moving pregnant ladies I have ever seen, started grabbing empty liter-and-a-half soda bottles to fill up and save for later. The water was back on.
We were able to fill up the several dozen soda bottles and two barrels about the size of a ten year-old in the hour before the water was shut off again, only to be turned on again at some undetermined hour the next day. That was two weeks ago. Since then the water situation has gotten worse.
When I first came here I wondered why my host family, with perhaps the nicest house in town, complete with tile floors and a large t.v., would choose to use latrines and bucket baths. Now I know that toilets don´t flush and shower heads don´t drip when there´s no water, and there hasn´t been water for quite some time. Río San Juan has one of the longest and wettest of the rainy seasons in Nicaragua, but we still suffer from water shortages in the dry season, and the Casa Materna was down to just two liters a few days ago. When the water was turned back on a few days ago no one was around to notice, and it all fell on the ground, and it´s been difficult to bring water in from outlying streams.
Dishes are sitting unwashed in the sink and cooking is difficult since even rice, beans, and tortillas all need water to prepare. The women have to go to the stream to bathe, and numerous of them have contracted UTIs, and since they are all in their last month of pregnancy this can be a dangerous problem, and I don´t even want to think about what would happen if one of them slipped and fell in the stream.
Two days ago, during a meeting with the health center, the director suggested building a well for the Casa Materna, and I silently wondered how I had been so slow as to not even consider the idea. It won´t be easy. True to Peace Corps philosophy of sustainable development, I would have to make sure I was working with the community as opposed to for them, so I´d need their full support. That means community meetings, estimations, supplies, someone who actually knows how to build wells, and waiting until the end of the rapidly approaching rainy season to begin construction, but I am very anxious for the community to support the idea.
I am almost scared to write about this on here, because I don´t want to get other people´s hopes up along with my own, but I feel as if someone keeps whispering "well" in my ear every five minutes. The gestation period will be long, but I hope that before my time here is done, the Casa Materna will have a beautiful baby well.
