MEDIUM RARE
Are we talking about saving water now that the well is dry or almost dry?
Hectare upon hectare of farmland in San Miguel, Bulacan, home province of Angat dam where Metro Manila gets its fair share of water for our taps, is experiencing thirst. Zamboanga City is under a state of calamity due to drought. Hospitals in Pampanga are on alert – how do you help patients when you’ve run out of water?
The call has been sounded, let’s plug all leaks, a dry spell is too big a burden for farmers as well as urban dwellers. And still your neighbor washes his car with a hose, or irrigates his garden under sunny skies, cleans his swimming pool “regularly,” filling it with fresh, clean water that could be put to better use for people instead of a collection of tiles.
What can you do as a pained but silent observer? If you cannot help your neighbor, neither could the meteorologist with a false forecast of rain, at least not until El Niño exits in June.
What a misnomer! El Niño, a boy-child with such a profound impact on the lives of millions of people in a country with two seasons that are beginning to meld into one, the hot, dry, rainless one. What is the solution, while our dams wait to be filled not by our tears but a blessed precipitation from the clouds? What good is a cloud that weighs the same as 100 elephants (quoting the naturalist Samuel Alibrando) but withholds falling rain?
One cheap weapon to use against the Nino is a dipper or two, or three – “tabo” in the vernacular -- made of plastic and costing under P50 each, with which to catch the rinse water in the bathroom and kitchen. The gray water (not really gray) is useful for practically anything but drinking. Wash your tires, the sidewalk, the floor of your garage.
In the kitchen, a cold soup of veggies is as easy to produce as a salad. Fresh fruits are kinder to my system, maybe yours as well, than steamed rice.
And if you’ve not been saving, conserving, unwasting water, it’s time you start feeling guilty for every drop that has not been caught and trapped in your dipper.