Water Water Everywhere

Water used to be a huge problem for Peace Corps volunteers in Africa.  When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana, West Africa, in 1971, my method of ensuring that my water was safe to drink was to boil it over a small coal stove for 15 minutes.  Needless to say, it was always important to think ahead and make sure I had enough boiled water. Traveling presented major challenges because safe drinking water was always difficult to find. In those days, there was no such thing as bottled water, as that was well before the bottled water craze, before anyone thought to bottle water.  During my first year in Ghana, I was often sick with dysentery from drinking unclean water.  By my second year, my stomach had grown accustomed to the local bacteria, but I still boiled my water at home.  Fast forward to 2018 and Rwanda, where safe drinking water is not a problem at all for three reasons.  

The first is that access to water is easier and more dependable.  In 1971, in Ghana, we hoped it would rain to fill our large oil drums that were stationed next to our metal roofs to catch the rainwater.  Or we were especially grateful to the students who carried heavy metal buckets of water on their heads a great distance uphill from the stream to the homes of the teachers. Although there were community water taps in town, they seldom operated.  However, in 2018 in Rwanda, we have running water. Not everyone is as fortunate as I to have running water in their homes, but many do. And, in my town, running water from a nearby pipe is available.  I have seen some people purchasing water in buckets or plastic jerrycans from another person who has a pipe in their compound.  The ease of access to water makes life so much easier.  I almost always have running water in my house.  The few times the water stopped, the school staff carried buckets of water from the school to my house to fill a large bin in my kitchen. However, Peace Corps volunteers still must purify the water from the pipes. Even with more easily accessible water, purification and filtration are required to ensure healthy drinking water.

Second, the Peace Corps has provided each volunteer with a first-class water filter/purifier from a company called British Berkefeld, which began making water filters around 1827 to purify water from the Thames River in London. The filter/purifier is super easy to use and very effective. It consists of 2 stainless steel canisters, one atop the other.  The top canister contains three long ceramic tubes or candles that filter and purify the water using gravity and without removing beneficial minerals.  I simply fill the top canister with water, add a quarter capful of bleach (a few drops), and the filter does the rest.  The filtered and purified water collects in the bottom canister, which has a spigot for easy use.  I refill my water filter every other day with water from the faucet in the bathtub in my house.  After a little less than 5 months of use, I cleaned the extremely dirty candles or tubes that filter the water inside the top canister.  Here is a photo of my trusty water filter/purifier that has kept me healthy for the past six months.  The photo on the right shows the ceramic tubes that filter and purify the water.

Third, bottled water is ubiquitous in Rwanda.  It’s sold in almost every shop.  It’s provided with our staff lunches at my school.  A small plastic bottle of water costs 300 Rwandan francs, which is about 35 cents.  I’ve seen bottled water from two Rwandan companies.  The first is called Sulfo Rwanda Industries, Ltd., which makes bottled water called “Source du Nil” (I mistakenly thought that nil was French for nothing, which would be a very unusual name for a water source.  However, my intellectual friend, Deborah, set me straight, explaining that Nil in French is Nile River, a perfectly sensible source for water here, as Rwanda is part of the Nile River Basin and quite possibly the source of the Nile, as the river flows north to Egypt.   The Nile River’s source in Rwanda is in Nyungwe Forest, a national park, where monkeys, chimpanzees and baboons are the chief residents sharing habitat with over 300 species of birds.  According to Nil’s label, the water is subjected to a “rigorous, state-of-the-art ten-step process that includes Reverse Osmosis, other filtering and disinfection methods like Ultraviolet disinfection, Ozonation, etc.” I can’t imagine what the et cetera would include, as it seems they’ve already done everything possible to the water.  

The other, and more popular, company that bottles and distributes water is Inyange Industries.  The label points out that the bottle is “BPA-free,” describes the water as “natural mineral water” and goes on to explain that the water comes from the natural springs of Gasabo in the foothills of Rwanda’s thousand hills and is naturally purified by Mother Nature.  I had imagined that Gasabo was in a very remote and pristine part of Rwanda, with sky high waterfalls, no people and frolicking monkeys.  However, when I looked it up on the internet, I was surprised to find that Gasabo is a section of Kigali, the capital and most populous city.  So it’s like getting our water from the city river.  In addition to bottled water, Inyange Industries sells a variety of fruit juices and dairy products, including butter, milk and yoghurt.  Inyange is pronounced in-yahn-jay and means egret – specifically cattle egret, which is a type of heron. According to Wikipedia, cattle egrets eat worms and insects, especially grasshoppers, crickets, flies, maggots, moths, spiders and frogs.  They like to hang out around cattle because their food supply of tasty bugs is better where cattle graze. The logo on all of Inyange Industries’ products is the cattle egret.

So, unlike Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” where there was water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink, here in Rwanda water is available  everywhere and there is plenty of safe water to drink.  

Plus, we drink coffee (mostly instant Nescafé), African tea (also known as milk tea because it is basically hot milk, black tea, spices and sugar), mukara (pronounced moo-car-ah, it is a spicy black tea and usually served with sugar already added) and, of course, my favorite ikivuguto (pronounced itchy-voo-goo-tow, which is kefir or liquid yogurt, which we drink by the cupful). And, Coke, Sprite and Fanta are available everywhere.