Water
When the water goes out everything falls apart. The rhythms are disrupted. My schedule gets messed up, the kids schedules get messed up, the daily lives of the teachers and their families are suddenly refocused. Survival is always a concern here, but when the water goes out the possibilities suddenly loom larger, the realities get a little more harsh, the decisions have to be weighed with more care. Things have to be sacrificed - a bath, clean dishes, excess drinking water - or someone has to find 45 extra minutes in an already packed day to haul a 20 liter bucket from the spring to the village. And that is not without its own cost: in calories, in sweat.
The girls are late for classes all day because the hostel kitchen must have water. Nsima for 200 hundred girls costs at least ten girls a trip, and there are three meals in a day. And then there’s tea, if they want it, and something to eat with the nsima. Some of them want to bathe or wash dishes, still. Some had meant to do laundry the day the water went out and at some point it won‘t wait anymore. They all have to drink. You can tell the girls aren’t getting enough sleep, less even than normal. And normal was already too little. Teenagers, even in Malawi, never get enough sleep.
And with the girls out, with half the class absent, the teachers don’t know what to do. To an American teacher it would sound silly: if there were only 40 kids in your class would you still teach? You need to put it into American classroom terms: if only 8 of your students made it to class one day, what would you do? Would you go ahead and teach through the awkward emptiness, knowing that absolutely everything you say will have to be repeated - these kids are not the sort who can get the notes from a classmate and teach themselves - or would you say, know what guys… let’s leave it for today; we’ll try again tomorrow. If you decide to teach, and if you decide not to repeat everything, remember: it’s the girls who suffer. Always the girls. The girls who are lucky that their families are letting them attend secondary school, the girls who are, all of them, in the midst of a last chance.
The students who are in class? They’re not in the best shape ever. As the days without water soldier on, the tolls mount up. Restlessness sets in, more fall sick - most stop washing their hands after going to the bathroom, they‘re dehydrated; a quiet room is punctuated by sneezes and phlegm-based coughs. The kids with HIV - and you know which ones they are - start to droop and then drop and miss more and more classes. The other teachers, too, start to look… to look just slightly the wrong colour. Mr. Kalenjeka and Mr. Magombo, whose wives are pregnant, go faster, and you suspect they’re being chivalrous.
School starts later everyday: 7:40, 7:45, 8:00. It’s hard to be mad at the kids for being late. It’s hard to be mad at the teachers. Mostly it’s just hard to be mad, to be anything. Takes too much energy. Energy to you don’t want to waste, because if you want to cook and drink and have a bath tonight, after 5 days of not washing, you’re going to have to make that trip to the spring twice this afternoon. To the spring and back with 15 liters of water in your hands or on your head. You’ve been doing well up until now, doing without and managing, but this morning you seriously considered not brushing your teeth, ‘cause it would save one more cup of water, and that’s when you know it’s time to make the trip.
It’ll come back, maybe right after you haul that second bucket of 15 liters, maybe 3 days from now. Whenever they figure out where the pipes have broken through. And when it does the little kids will have water fights at the tap and the girls will spread clean laundry across the fields. You know this and you know that the rejoicing will make up for the listless depression of the previous week - it’s part of the cycle; Africa is a lot like being manic-depressive. You know this, but it doesn’t make today much easier. You know this, just like you know that for the week or so after the water does come back everyone will horde a bucket or three of extra water in their house, just in case it doesn’t stay.
The days without water soldier on. And everything falls apart.