Project Sekong 2012: Our new challenge is finding clean drinking and cooking water for camp.
We are dependent on water piped down the mountain for drinking and cooking but that source is drying up. Hopefully, what water there is will see us through the remainder of our project. We hope to avoid having to boil river water, but it might come to that.
Report 32
I’m growing worried about our water supply. We arrived here with eight 20-liter bottles of water, and a 400-liter storage tank. Every container was filled with water from a water factory in Sekong.
Does that mean that our drinking water was guaranteed wholesome and pure? As a horse trader in Wisconsin once told me when I asked him to guarantee the health of a horse, “In this life, son, the only guarantee is that there ain’t no guarantee.” But…it was the best water we were going to find near this village and, so far, we’ve all stayed healthy.
The very first day that the whole team was in camp, we discovered that the 400-litter tank was only a 200-liter tank. It has a split seam in its midsection and won’t hold water above that level — a disappointment, but not a game changer.
We have limited our use of factory water to drinking and cooking. We wash pots, pans, dishes and eating utensils in cold water that flows continuously through a pipe that runs down the hillside from some unseen, providential spring. Then, we rinse those items in a pan of spring water that we’ve boiled over our campfire.
The team can choose to bathe at either the pipe or in a nearby river. The river offers a more satisfying volume of water, but water buffalo wallow in sluggish places upstream and it’s a known fact (you can look this up) that the very first thing a water buffalo does when he steps into a pool is evacuate his bowels. I’m proud to report, everyone on our team has chosen to bathe at the pipe.
We have now consumed all of our factory water. Unfortunately, on our last food run we learned that we can’t refill our bottles; the factory is out of commission. So… we loaded up, not on bottled water, but on bags of charcoal in anticipation of boiling water from the mountain spring around the clock, to stay ahead of our consumption.
Now, it appears that the volume of spring water pouring out of the pipe has, for some reason, been reduced by half. What’s going on? A leak in the pipe? The spring going dry? If that source dries up, we’ll be in serious trouble.
Forget winter, spring, summer and fall. Laos only has two natural seasons: the dry season and the rainy season. (Some people subdivide the dry season into two parts and talk about the “burning season,” the weeks when farmers burn their fields and the resulting smoke cover can be seen from space. But…since that’s not a climatic event, so I discount it).
The water running down the hill and through our pipe did not fall just recently as rain. (We are deep into the dry season). Rather, its source must be a spring flowing from an aquifer, discharging water that rained down months ago and saturated fissures in the rock. (The Lao have a proverb that advises someone looking for water to “go up the mountain, not down”).
This part of Lao gets as much as 80 inches of rain a year, abundant precipitation that annually recharges the aquifer that we’re tapped into. But…there must be years when that aquifer goes dry. If that happens this year, buffalo or no buffalo, we’ll all be bathing in the river.