So you want to change the world?

So you want to change the world? Well sometimes it doesn’t want to be changed. That doesn’t mean you should stop trying. It just means that your efforts won’t always be fruitful. Some children still grow up be murderers, some people still starve in the streets, and sometimes you just don’t strike water.

It’s easy to take clean water for granted in the United States. You can turn on almost any home faucet and voila! What if you live in a village on water though? That doesn’t sound so bad. But what if the water is salt water mixed with some fresh water, mixed with water that runs off the land where you and all of your animals use the bathroom? Hopefully you have a cistern or a filter or (best for larger quantities of people) a well.

We went, hoping to change a few lives. The village of Rosario has a 5 gallon sawyer filter (good to give 10 families clean water for one year…or at least that’s what I heard), but that’s hardly efficient for a village. There may have even been more than one filter. But still, this isn't a filter on your tap in your house. This is 5 gallons at a time for however many families assigned to it. No just turning on the faucet whenever you want. You may have to fill a bucket and trek it a mile or two back home.

A year or two ago another group tried to drill there. They drilled down 100 feet and never hit water. We were hoping to do better. We pulled onto shore and unloaded the boat and started hauling the rest of the drilling supplies 30-45 minutes up the muddy trail through the forest to Rosario. The drill itself was already there, carried up by the locals a day or two earlier. Unfortunately we arrived on Guatemala’s Independence Day. Who wants to work when there are celebrations to be had? So, we turned around and made the slippery hike back out. Good day for hammock-sitting.

Sunday morning: round two. We pulled on our mud-caked shoes and headed for the boat ramp. Ten minutes later we pulled up to shore and hiked back in. Now, what on earth is a white girl with no experience in drilling supposed to do to help all the wiry Guatemalan men set up a drill? Nothing. She is supposed to do nothing. But I digress. The point is. Only so many people can dig the two pools, and set up the tower, and make sure the water pump is good to go, and that there is water to run through the drill, and gas and diesel and oil in all their respective places. It sounds like a lot, but when the whole village is invested heart and soul into this thing improving their quality of life (if only a little) there is no shortage of helping hands.

Everything was set to go and the drilling began! Oh! Being the compulsive scribbler that I am, I did have pen and paper on hand. This turned out to be my contribution. I kept track of how deep we had gone and what we had drilled through on the way. Five feet. Clay. Ten feet. Clay. Fifty feet. Clay. One Hundred Feet. Clay. We ran out of pipe on Monday at 125 feet. Still Clay. The people of Rosario want clean water. We wanted to give it to them. That isn’t always enough though. The earth simply wasn’t willing to comply. We backed the pipe out, took the drill down and began hauling everything back out to the shore. *I’d like to comment here that by haul, I do literally mean carry. A tiny man (barely 5 feet tall) will strap a 100-pound tower, 7 feet tall) to his forehead and haul off through the forest at a pace I can almost comfortably keep without carrying anything. Yeah. My white girl problems felt pretty silly after seeing that.

The people of Rosario may find another spot to try to drill. They may be supplied with a few more filters. They have survived for this long and will undoubtedly persevere on. The earth has her own plans. We can’t be discouraged though. We can only keep trying and hope that one day our plans coincide with what the earth is willing to give.