Water in the desert is never a simple thing to find. We are in the very small minority of people here who actually have “running” water in our house. For this blessing, we are grateful, although we once took it for granted! In order to have water readily available at the kitchen sink or toilet, we needed to have a place to store large amounts high off of the ground, where we could take advantage of the law of gravity to provide some pressure to make the water “run”. So, we hired a welder and other workers to construct a tower capable of holding a large (550 gallon, nearly 5000 lbs. when full) tank.. The base of the tank is nearly 12 feet off the ground, and the tank itself is about 6 feet tall.
Every day, we pay for multiple “pousse-pousse” deliveries. A “pousse-pousse” (pousser is the French verb for “to push, or roll”) is a push cart with 10 jerry cans of water. This is how water is delivered to homes in Abeche. Young men fill their carts with water from a well, paying a small fee, and then push the cart around town to deliver the water. The cost for a single pousse is $1.50 – $2.00. When they arrive, they pour the water into a small holding tank at the base of the water tower, and we turn on a pump that’s connected to our solar power system. The water is pumped from the holding tank up nearly 18 ft. to the top of the large tank. The large tank has a pipe feeding our house and voila, we have running water!
There have been a few learning curves for our family, however, when it comes to our running water. Because it is such hard work and costs money to get it to our house, we are trying to teach our boys (and ourselves) to be very conscious of every bit of water we use. We still allow them to play with a small bucket or two in the sand each day. However, their bath water gets dumped from the big basins onto the trees next to where they bathe. We turn the water off each time we don’t need to use it while brushing teeth or during a shower. Instead of flushing our toilet (which is possible), we are trying to get into the habit of flushing manually by pouring water down. Otherwise, an excess of water is used to fill the tank each time it is flushed.
Are there ways you try to conserve water in your home? Is there a place in your home next to a water source where you could put a reminder to pray for those unengaged groups of eastern Chad who not only have no running water but also don’t yet know or love the Source of Living Water?