The Dirty Dirty

After a while you stop noticing the layer of grime that perpetually covers your skin, and it just becomes an accepted fact of life in Honduras. The fact that we don´t have water, while not the root cause of my dirtiness, certainly does't help. But the impossibiity of becoming clean is really caused by two factors: dust and heat.

Dust is simply a ubiquitous entity here in Juticalpa - like I said, less than half the roads are paved. When a car drives by on a dirt road, it kicks up dust like a sand storm. The dust combnes with the unfiltered, acrid fumes of the cars (which I can´t imagine are often brought in for tune-ups, judging by the way they sound and smell), to create a thick, hazy, suffocating fot that covers everything in town. and I mean everything. Even if you go into an upscale Pulperia, you'll find most products inside covered with a layer of dust such that the store employees who are hired to help customers find what they're looking for are also paid to carry around a rag and wipe dust off packages before handing them to customers.

What makes the dust worse, though, is that the intense heat of the Honduran sun makes you sweat constantly so the dust sticks to your skin the second it hits you, and it stays. Everytime I go to wipe the sweat off my forehead, I leave behind a brown streak of dirt on my shirt.

All this is compounded by the fact that we don't have water. In Juti, people either get their water from wells that are connected to their faucet system, or their houses are connected to the municipal water system. While most well systems have continued to provide water, the municipal system stopped providing awter a week before I came, and still is not working. Our apartment, of course, is connected to the municipal system, and so we are waterless. That means no showers to wash off tat layer of grime from your skin (I've only taken one shower since I arrived). That also means you can't flush the toilet unless you fill the back unit with water from some other source. Which means you don't flush everytime you use the toilet. Fortunately, you get used it it and you make do, but that doesn't make it any less gross.

To be able to have water for things like flushing the toilet when the faucets are't working, we have a pila, which is a tiled rectangular basin to store water on our patio and is filled by rainwater and/or by tap water. It probably has the capacity to hold around 40 or so gallons, but it has less than 10 at the moment so we have to be conservative about how often we flush the toilet.

Not having tap water also makes simple things like wiping off the counter a luxury. If theres a spill, we often don't have water to wipe it up right away, which leads to our cohabiting with many tiny six-legged roomates. Fortunately the ants in our house are so tiny they´re not really bothersome, and they're in pretty much everyone's house anyway. Just another fact of life that you don't pay very much attention to.

It's amazing hou in spite of such a big problem like not having water, life goes on as normal. There's no panic, no public outrage at the government, no media coverage of protests in the streets. People just make do by showering at neighbors' houses who have wells, buying water in 5 gallon jugs (cost = 30 lempiras or about $1.50 US), or simply going without showering for a while. It's a nice change to see people so relaxed, able to adapt to different and often inconvenient situations.

¡Viva La Vida Olachana!