On water

You may think a post about water is going to be exceedingly dull. Or you may be the adventurous type and your interest is piqued as to what in the world this person could possibly do to make water interesting. Well I can assure you, I am not one to make promises so this very well could be a giant waste of your time. In that case, you'd better take your chances and stop reading right now. Time is of the essence!

Our life in the swamps, quite literally, revolves around water. Or rather, I should say that water revolves around us. It is a swamp after all. When you think of swamp I am not sure what comes to mind. Prior to living in these wetlands, I thought of Florida or Louisiana when I thought of swamps. Bogs and marshes, alligators, mud, Swamp People (the show), people with odd accents, mosquitos, and and a lot of.....well, water. So when we moved here, that's what I was picturing. Come to find out, the picture I had in my mind was very similar to the reality that is life here in the coastal swamp. Minus Swamp People (the show). And Florida. We have people with odd accents (more like a totally different language, but Creole basically is anyways), crocodiles, mud, mosquitoes, and lots of water. The people here subsist off of the land which, in this part of the world, means the river. Their main transportation system is dugout canoes which they create by hacking out a certain type of tree til it takes the shape of a boat. Ok, I'm not making fun, since it is quite the process but all you need to know is it starts as a tree and ends up as a canoe. Walking anywhere (more like slogging) is a nightmare and they only do it if they can't get there by canoe. 

To give you an idea of how wet it is out here, I can tell you that at one point we got a reading at negative sea level. We have no hills, not a single rock, no mountains within sight. We are essentially just floating around on a pseudo land mass. Yes, we had to pour cement around each of our house posts so we don't sink. We're probably still sinking but at least with how slow it is we have the illusion of not sinking. It's all about tricking the mind.

📷: our village is at that bend in the river

 The river is not one of those nice clear, flowing rivers that basically cleans itself. Because it's actually a tidal river. Which means instead of the water flowing constantly from up in the mountains (remember, no mountains in sight), the river flows up and down with the tide. About 20 minutes "downriver" is the ocean, only a few miles away as the crow flies. Every day, the water flows down and up with the tide. Depending on the time of year, the moon, if it's westwind season, and how much rain we've gotten, it will flow faster or slower. 

When it's low it looks like this:

When it's high it looks like this:

 During certain times of the year when some of these conditions align, the high tides will be higher and the water literally seeps up and floods the ground. This is what we get:

This is what we call negative sea level, people.  

Needless to say, our kids don't have a great yard. It would be fun to splash around in the water, and they often do, but it's very uneven ground and your feet sink in to the ground every other step, making it difficult to do anything but get wet and muddy. Fun for a while, but sometimes we just want a flat, grassy yard to kick a soccer ball around on. Alas, woe is us.

The government has helped the community solve this problem by building raised boardwalks through the village, which definitely helps. 

Not precarious at all.

The villagers do not have access to clean water, what with the fact that we are in The Middle of Nowhere, the fact that the river water is salty and murky, and the fact that wells are an impossibility. So the only way to get water is rain collection. Our first year here was a "fun" trial by error when it came to how many water tanks we needed to provide enough water for our family. Turns out we use water for a lot of things: bathing, cleaning, and drinking...in case you were wondering. Also turns out that we were unprepared for a 22 day drought that left us scraping the literal bottom of our tanks as we abandoned washing clothes, bathed as little as possible, and used the bare minimum of water possible to wash our dishes. Our rule was...drinking water comes first. We can stink up the whole house with BO but we will not thirst to death! Those days we spent a lot of time watching the eastern horizon literally praying for rain. But hey, our solar panels were quite happy (another topic for another time).

When it finally did rain, we were so thankful, and vowed never to take water for granted again. Which of course we broke that promise pretty quickly, but we had learned our lesson and it really has changed our perspective on water usage, rain not just as a way to water our plants, and the humility that comes realizing that the Asmat people have been relying on water like this for decades. 

If you know me, you know that one of my favorite things is rain. Living here has only increased my love for it because now not only do I want it to rain, we often NEED it to rain. So when it does, it makes me think that all is right with the world and everything is going to be fine. The sound of rain on a tin roof is something else. When an actual tropical rain storm comes it can be so deafening that we can't even hear each other talk. Then we just stop and watch it or maybe even make some coffee and read a book. The really exciting thing about our house is we made it with so many screens for airflow that a little bit of wind combined with the rain is basically like it's raining in the house. What fun! You should probably move the rice cooker and your phone far away from the window because when the storm is over, sometimes the kitchen is one giant puddle. Oh well, a little water never hurt anyone! And you barely even need to mop because the water just seeps through the floor boards onto the ground! So you see, life in the coastal swamps is just plain wet. There's water above us, below us, and all around us. The weather readings always report 99% humidity.  And for some reason I still get frustrated when my clothes mold in the drawer and the salt won't pour out of the shaker.  I feel as though I still have a lot to learn...