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Importance of conserving water resources

By Rev. Thomas Flanagan, Ed.D.
Guest Commentary

When I was a grade school student I used to spend many weeks of the summer with my grandparents who lived in South Dakota. I have wonderful memories of those days of working in the garden, going fishing, spending time woodworking, enjoying picnics and playing with cousins, and many other fun times. It was a time of bonding that occurred between my grandparents and me.

My grandparents were very conscious of the need to conserve resources; they had gone through some tough times in what my mother used to refer to as the “dirty thirties” when much of South Dakota was a dust bowl. I recall how, whenever my grandmother used water to wash vegetables or peel potatoes, she would use a large pan to hold the water for the work. When she was finished it was always my job to carry the water out and throw it next to some tree or rosebush or other plant, or to carry it with its vegetable remnants down to the chickens.

Conserving water was important. We don’t think about that much in our day when the water and vegetable peelings are quickly whisked away by the garbage disposal in the sink. Times have changed, but the need to think about how we use water hasn’t!

For us, water is pretty much always available as soon as we turn on the tap, and we find it a major inconvenience during those occasional hours when the city shuts it off to take care of some repair work on the city pipes. Most of us don’t think anything of leaving the water run while we brush our teeth or of taking a very long, leisurely hot shower. Our lawns usually look great even in the hottest, driest months, since our built-in water sprinklers take over the work of watering with their computerized timings.

Things are much different in many mission countries. When I was working as a missionary in Malawi, Africa, I stayed often in rectories there where pipes were installed throughout the house for running water, but there was no water in the pipes! In one case it was because the motor on the pump at the well had long since stopped running and there was no money to repair it. As a substitute, water was carried in from another nearby well – it was always the women who did this work, each one making several trips to the well and back, carrying their five-gallon buckets filled with water on their heads! The water was poured into large plastic drums in the attached kitchen. From there the water was carried into the house where we used it to wash dishes, clothes and ourselves. A shower often consisted of using a small pitcher to scoop cold water from a bucket that one poured over one’s head. And there were other rectories or homes where I stayed where there was running water, at least in theory, but it would be shut off daily for eight or twelve hours at a time.

I recall an elderly widow in India who walks daily to a distant well to fetch water in her bucket. She is one of many such examples of a resilient people who find a way to manage when the resources are more difficult to find. An especially severe condition of water is one that I found when visiting a small village in Bolivia, South America. The village was a small cluster of about twelve houses, one for each of the families who lived there. Their water source was the local river which carried more or less water depending on the rains. Besides the water it also carried a large portion of arsenic, a chemical that was used by a mining company upstream, which dumped its waste into the river. The arsenic was present in sufficient quantity to eventually cause the front teeth of those who drank it to fall out. With no real dental possibilities around – or even money to pay for it if there had been – these people simply lived with their missing upper and lower set of front teeth!

We are indeed blessed here with the availability of water! During a rainy summer like the one we are having now here in Northwest Iowa, we may think we have enough! Still, it would be unfortunate if we simply took water for granted and did not respect the gift that it is.