Water on My Mind

I joined the gym two weeks ago to swim – it’s a risk-free form of exercise which works the whole body and encourages proper breathing. I also find it meditative. It’s taken me about a year to get my act together – I hate gyms but I have always loved swimming and some form of regular and sustainable exercise has been long overdue. I am quite impressed with the local gym’s water-saving measures (buckets to collect water in the showers for use in the toilets, 2-minute timers and the sauna and steam rooms have been shut down).

Access to something that I have taken for granted all my life has taken up so much of my consciousness. Ignorance, mismanagement and laissez-faire attitudes to preparing for the water crisis in Cape Town have led us to the point where it is very likely that access to water will be highly controlled. As the crisis deepens those who can afford to, are waiting months for boreholes to be dug, trucking in water for their pools and gardens, stockpiling bottled water while others are squabbling in queues to collect water from springs. For the last few weeks the council comes to flush out the sewage drain in our road which keeps blocking. They say it keeps clogging because of old tree roots in the system. I have my own theory – there is so much less water going through the system as we cut down on flushing that it’s bound to cause the system to back up and block.

The waft of sewage, not flushing the toilet and using the least possible amount of water leaves me with a constant feeling of not being hygienic enough. It’s scary. Which brings me to a a book I came across about four or five years ago, written by a South African writer, Karen Jayes, For the Mercy of Water, a speculative fiction work which actually, at the time, didn’t seem too much of a stretch to imagine. Now, of course, the ideas of a world where water is at a premium and guards have to watch over the source and supply have become much more real.

Image from Google Books 

In Jayes’ book, a country, which she hasn’t identified, is in the midst of a severe drought and water has become a very valuable resource. She has chosen to only name only the girl characters, as she said in a seminar, that often it’s the girls who are most abused in situations of conflict. She steers away from any identifying descriptions which may be interpreted as racial. This ‘anonymity’ creates an equality, albeit a surreal-ness, but reinforces the view that this could be happening to any of us, anywhere in the world.  And, indeed, water has been an issue of conflict in many parts of the world already – the Middle East, Africa and India – and access to water has been used as a political tool.

The narrative focuses on the journey a young writer takes to uncover a story that emerges when an unexpected rainfall leads guards to a remote town thought to be abandoned.

Jayes, K. 2012. For the Mercy of Water. Penguin. Johannesburg