Friday, September 12, 2008

Taking Things For Granted

I never valued water so much until last night.  Here in Peru we cannot drink the tap water because it is not safe.  We could get parasites or other nasty things and frankly I want to avoid that.  So we have to buy very large bottles of water and apparently one does not cut it for me.  I ran out on Tuesday after buying it on Saturday and had planned to go buy more but... well, I'm a slacker apparently.  

It wasn't a huge deal at first.  I bought water at lunch and had been refilling the little water bottle at Sali because there's a monster water container in the kitchen that's safe to drink.  But after our hour and a half soccer game I had run out, and I was dying!  Ok, so I wasn't but I was really, really thirsty.  So I decided to boil some tap water.  Good idea right?  Yeah sure, if you want water the next day.  It was far too hot to drink right away and I really needed some good old H2O and fast. 

So I had another brilliant idea: ice!  We had a bag of ice in the refridgerator!  Perfect.  So I grab the bag by the end that I believe is the open end and pull it out of the freezer.  Unfortunately, the bag was open on the other end, and all of the ice came crashing down on my toes!  Ice went everywhere, the cat started licking up the dirty water, and I crumpled to the ground in pain with one bleeding toe.  My poor, sick roommate Heather came to the rescue and swept up all the ice and put it in the sink while I limped to find a bandaid.  Needless to say I didn't get much water last night but I did learn a lesson in slowing down and checking bag openings.  

Also, I will start buying at least two bottles of water on Saturdays.  

1 comment:

Nicole said...

Courtney,

Same thing happened to me in Sierra Leone, W. Africa this summer! A good lesson for us I think.