Water in India

I was pleased to find that I had a bathroom in my room at the Bishop's House when I first arrived. But I was disappointed that it only had a sink and a commode, no tub or shower. I assumed that since the House was originally a seminary with dorm style housing that plumbing for individual showers had been too difficult. After having been to many convents and a few houses, I realized that nobody has tubs or showers in Andhra Pradesh, even in new construction housing. It's not a cleanliness issue, it's that water is too precious to waste here in this arid state.

Here at the Bishop's House, they have to buy water by the truckful since the pipes to their well were cut during the widening of the street. They haven't yet been able to reattach their connection and they're not sure they will ever be able to. In villages, the entire community shares a common well for drinking water. Each village also has a field that has been designed to hold water for agricultural irrigation. The country is trying to construct canals to bring more water to the area but it's still a long way off. So they are largely dependent on the success of the rainy season. In the West we always seem to think of the monsoon season as a negative: storms, damage, miserable weather. But the rains are something this is celebrated here.

Laundry is always done by hand, outside, in whatever water source is available. I have seen women doing laundry in large puddles on the side of the road by the fields. But mostly it's done in the rivers. The National Geographic pictures you have seen of women beating the clothes on rocks aren't staged photographs of the "local color". This is simply how it's down across India. If you have enough money, you can pay someone to wash clothes for you. But they will still cart them down to the river, wash them, lay them out to dry on the ground. They hang the long saris from the bridges and overpasses on the road going out of town so that it looks like the parade route for a UN meeting. Then everything is ironed with irons warmed with coal: socks, sheets, underwear, etc.:. A few homes have electric irons. Even my clothes are now go in the laundry once a week. They come back amazingly clean. I wonder if I should try this in Richfield down at the spillway?