Water, Water, Nowhere

When I arrived at 2am to my home for the next six months I was simply grateful that I was not in the airport attempting paranoid sleep sloughed over six chairs with tired fingers on my bags, again, after days of airport hopping.  The next day, after much needed sleep, myself and 5 other interns with our local support worker hit the ground running when we went to, probably, the busiest market in Dar es Salaam, Kariakoo.  After such a busy week and a day full of utter jet lag and confusion, I was excited to be at my new home but became concerned when we returned to no power.  I imagined, maybe, that there was a power outage, or that I needed to pay for my electricity, somehow, somewhere.  The next day power returned, no harm done for us, and I was slightly relieved there was no bill to pay already and forgot about it.  During the next couple days, water services were intermittent and I became aware that my routine of charging my phone, computer, and showering with water and power on demand needed changing.  My roommate and I filled up buckets of water and now charge whenever possible now acutely aware of our privilege that we took for granted so easily in Canada like having water come out of the tap when you turn one of the knobs.  This was the way things were and after the first week there were no real problems for us with this system and we chalked it up to part of the cultural adaptation necessary when experiencing a cross cultural exchange.

            Things started to get real after water was shut off for 1 whole day, then 2, then 3…. But then, on the National Holiday October 14^th, water came on! Oh what a glorious day… but that only turned into a couple of hours. But, it was enough to have a nice shower, do laundry and fill up our lackluster bucket collection.  We started to hear and read about the critical levels of water in the river, which run the hydroelectricity plants, which explains the water and power issues.

            In Canada, most of us are privileged with our water, but this year was different, for British Columbia at least, because we also had critically low water levels.  Now, the rainy season has luckily come back, but maybe it has taken a little more of the topsoil to the gutters and back to the ocean than usual, and who knows what the years to come will bring.  BC also uses hydroelectricity and I wonder if the problem here in Tanzania will mirror what might happen in BC in years to come.  I’ve gone from severe drought in BC to severe drought in Tanzania and it makes me think about water a lot. 

            I won’t lie, I’m not always very conscientious with my water and I’ve been known to take a long shower once in a while. But water is like that old saying, and more recently the Joni Mitchell song, “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone” and I am realizing how much I love it. 

            I also love politics, which is why I’m going to put some of that in here too!  The now previous Harper Government completely gutted the Fisheries Act, which now allows mining companies to dump toxic waste into freshwater bodies, even if they have fish in them.  Did you get that? The Fisheries Act no longer protects fish! Read this, from my hero,

Originally intended only to apply to lakes that were already dead, “Schedule 2” reclassified healthy lakes as a “tailings impoundment areas” and no longer protected them under the Fisheries Act. Already Sandy Pond in Newfoundland has been destroyed under this loophole and Environment Canada has released the names of 29 natural water bodies that mining companies have applied to use as toxic waste dumps. [emphasis added]

(Council of Canadians, Blue Betrayal (2015), pg. 5)

As the rainy season returns to my lovely province of BC, while where I am I’m not sure when it will be better I just want people to think about what water means to them.  An election is coming up in Tanzania, and one has just passed in Canada.  Many people believe that the most important civic duty is to vote.  Don’t get me wrong, as a political scientist that supports participatory democracy I support voting but what I want to say is that real participatory democracy doesn’t happen on a single day every 4-5 years, it happens everyday.  Make your love for water heard and be advocates to restore the Fisheries Act, the Navigable Waters Act, and the Environmental Assessment Act to safeguard our freshwater bodies in case droughts and severe weather patterns change in the coming years which I think I’ve heard something about somewhere….