My Beloved, Water
5/22/23
I tried waking up early to work on the outhouse, that didn’t work well. I was on cooking duty, so after making quinoa with flax seeds, strawberries, dates, honey, roasted pumpkin and sunflower seeds with homemade soymilk it was 9 am. Cooking like this takes forever, but it’s interesting how it’s changing our bodies. I feel lighter and like I have more energy, except for the sun! The sun is so strong and intense. After being out there for an hour I felt dizzy and weak, I got tired and had to go inside. When we checked the temperature, it was 100 degrees, the high today was 106. The sun is so draining I retreated inside and planned to sit in front of the AC, I already felt exhausted.
Beloved Water Photo by Jack
My duties weren’t over yet, by then it was lunch time, and Skip and I had to dole out water from the water tank. I begrudgingly dragged myself back into the heat, feeling lightheaded. As we were pouring the water out of the water tank, I started daydreaming that I could take the hose and dump it on my head and spray everyone, but we cannot afford to even spill a drop, we want this to last us as long as we can. Suddenly we heard a scream, Moso was soaking wet. The old water tower that we were told was empty still had salt water in it and the bottom of the water tower was eroding out and was dripping salt water onto the ground. All 8 women dropped what we were doing and danced under the water leak, it was so beautiful to see us coming from divergent backgrounds and struggles brought together because of water. Water is what we are all in need of, water is what has caused this war and water is what makes us happy. The water splashed across all our faces and for a few moments we weren’t 8 women hiding out in the desert but eight friends having fun. BCC: even exclaimed it was the best Monday ever! The water was not very clean but it felt amazing. We were all in a better mood after that. Such an unexpected blessing, you don’t know what you got until its gone. To think that the rich can still have sprinklers on their lawns and do not even feel urged to jump into them shows what two different realities we are living in. Water for recreation is something only the rich still have access too, for the rest of us we rely on the unexpected blessings like rain and water leaks.
Got a lot of moral and ethical issues going on here. I was thinking as reading this, how easy it would be for someone to just sneak over and take a little extra water hoping that no one would notice and bamn, you say that you were day dreaming about drenching yourself with the hose. I guess everyone else was lucky that tower sprung a leak, lol. Real talk though, that is a serious issue with collective action problems, free-riding. Like in the prisoner’s dilemma, if everyone participates and lives up to their end of the bargain, no matter how much discomfort there is in the short-run, then all are better off in the long-run. However, the incentive in the short-run is not to participate and live up to one’s end of the bargain and for everyone to seek to benefit their self. Yet, if and when that occurs then all the people are made worse off. The violation of a collective action or communal problem is only beneficial to the free-riders if others live up to their end of the deal. I was happy to hear, that at least for this day, everyone was living up to their end of the bargain.