Wednesday we carried water

Wednesday we carried water. We carried the same volume that local women and children carry, up the same slopes and on the same trails, and we were floored. One of the students, 6'1'', 240 pound Chris Drescher, Adventure West Virginia leader, high school football captain and, as is he is commonly called by kids here, 'big man', had as much trouble as anyone else. He took breaks, he took turns, he sweated, grew tired, and complained about aches – as we all did, and all the while a local woman steadily moved up the mountain, 5 gallons of water balanced on her head.

We were gathering the water to help the local masons with cement mixing. The cement is to finish the outside of the cement Water Tank at the Eden Center. (The plastic tanks we purchased the other day were for local women's houses). The local masons buy bags of cement, then mix the cement with sand to make the mixture go farther. On the inside of the tank they mixed at a ratio of 3 parts sand, 1 part cement, but on the outside where we're working now they mix at 5:1. The water comes from the valley behind the Eden Center.

As we walked down to fetch it we could see trails coming down from each of the nearby hills, converging on this point, and there were women and children coming and going. We did see one young man. He was carrying one can on his head with another tied to his back (this is twice the amount any one of us carried). Joseph suggested he was probably going to sell it, as men more commonly gather water to sell, while women and children gather it for familial use. I do know that the people one regularly sees getting water are women and children.

The cement mix came from a hardware store in Bukoba. But the sand was another story. At the Eden Center, over time, Joseph has had people dig down through sandstone. The sandstone is then steadily broken into pieces. We used a piece of wire mesh to sift the sand from the remaining bits of stone and then we carried the sand over to the mixing area.

After that – and unexpectedly – we went directly to Joseph's neighbor's wedding. The couple had been together for many years and had nine children. They were excited to make it official. They welcomed us, offered sodas and beers, and we danced. There were plastic chairs set out under tarps. The dance floor was straw. The music system was essentially a boom box reminiscent of the 1980s, and it was running off of a car battery.

One of the tarps over our heads had UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees) printed on it, signifying two things. First, we are close enough to Rwanda here that there were tens of thousands of refugees in the area following the 1994 genocide there. Second, materials in Africa get reused. Scarcity discourages waste.