It's very easy to take water for granted. In the United States, we just turn on a tap, and magically, water comes out. Except in my house today. (more on that in a moment.) In many places in the world, there is no expectation that clean water is easily accessible. Children walk for miles to fetch water. People get sick from drinking from unsafe water supplies. It's Blog Action day and this year's cause was selected to be clean water. I learned about this from a BlogHer Blog by Mindful Momma about clean water.
And oddly enough, for me for today this was exactly the message I needed to hear, because for me for today water is something I've had to think about consciously.
We live in a neighborhood in an unincorporated part of town. We're on well and septic. This means that 640 feet below our house, a pump siphons water out of the St. Pete's Aquifer, or some such. Good news is, the well is so deep we'll literally never run dry. Bad news? The well might not run dry, but the pump can fail, or the pipe can spring leaks, or a check valve can go bad. Any one of which may have happened to our pump recently.
Important homeowner maintenance note: When your well is dug to a depth of 640 feet and will never run dry, this is good, but when maintenance needs to take place on your deep well, turns out they charge by the foot (new materials, labor, whatever.) Yikes!
So we're limping through the weekend with very little water pressure, turning the pump off after each water use so it doesn't burn out or make the leak (current theory) any worse (note: if the leak gets worse it could cause the pipe to break off, dropping the pump down to the bottom of the well - it currenly sits at about 500 feet - which, in the words of the well guy, "is very expensive.")
And I'm thinking about the fact that my shower will be more of a trickle and I have to plan when to run the dishwasher and let the laundry pile up. And then I remember that water is easy for me to get. So if you're looking for something to do today, a cause to believe in, consider the needs of about 1/6th of the world's population, the ones who don't have easy access to water.
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