Gully Foyle

This is a couple of years old.......

The Old Groaner

Cry,cry,cry when the well runs dry

Yesterday I informed her that as the rainfall hereabouts had only been about 50% of the usual winter fall, then we would quite likely be short of water this coming season. She rolled her eyes, no doubt recalling the time when she regularly had to carry water from the village fountain, from the school or from the mosque. She would either have to tow her little cart with about 120 liters in it or carry cans on her back with about 80 liters. Either way it was hard work, remember that 1 liter weighs a kilogram. Anyway I reminded her that such work is very normal for village donkeys. Again with the rolling eyes!
The water supply problem is potentially worse today than it was those years ago because we now have only one source. For the previous 350 years the village drew water from a spring some 5 miles away. It was originally led into the valley in an open channel ingeniously built onto hillsides with a gradual fall down to the water fountains in our villages. Over time the open channel became a clay pipe, then an iron pipe and some 30 years ago a steel pipe. All was well until the explosive influx of bloody-tourists about 8 years ago, they polluted the water souce. Well, to be fair, we can’t blame the tourists themselves they used the white glazed ware in the hotels for the purpose intended and like good citizens flushed and brushed as required. [Putting tissues in the bins provided of course.] The trouble began after the “S” bends; all those flushes took the waste straight down the hill in the direction of our water source. Still, even that polluted water may have been of some use for agricultural purposes but I’m sorry to say that it is shamefully wasted throughout the valley.
Our only remaining potable water supply now comes from much further afield; probably about 15 miles away. The water is the summer melt of the winter’s snow and is as pure as The Creator intended. All would be fine except for the fact that the pipes run through the same tourist town which polluted the old water. The inhabitants of that town consider that keeping the tourists cool and clean and the streets damped against dust is far more important that the survival of a few peasant farmers and eccentric European settlers, so they frequently cut off our water supply. Many years ago I had a key made and would frequently take my life in my hands and cycle to a road junction at 3 o’clock in the morning to turn our water on again for a few precious hours.
Wouldn’t you suppose that in a valley which has had a water shortage for thousands of years that conservation thereof would be automatic? Not a bit of it. Throughout the valley publicly accessible taps are left on for days on end, or suffer severe and continuous leaks, and I can count up to a dozen water storage tanks of 30 to 80 tons capacity which lie empty save for the old bicycles, rotten produce and dead chickens dumped in them. That fact becomes particularly annoying when every newcomer into the valley suggests that to solve the water problem we build a large reservoir. We would share the costs and fairly share the water! Ha! We are blessed by having excellent neighbours but in the past if my hose was detached from the stand pipe in favour of Ali’s hose then he would simply explain that he needed the water!
The down side of having pipes as opposed to the open channel to carry the water from that now polluted water source was that the bees could not access the water, so of course during the pipe–century the beekeepers “upstream” of us thought it quite acceptable to smash the pipe during the height of the summer so as to quench the thirsts of their multiple little charges.
I think that we can fairly conclude that when it comes to the question of water supply, people can be extremely selfish, a point to be borne in mind at this time of global warming, rising urbanization and increased standard of living expectations worldwide, especially where national boundaries, arbitrarily and inconveniently cross major waterways. Remember…“But we needed the water!”
Myself, eventually I may well go back to sea…