The luxury of water

I look at my clothes after work, and, of course, they are dusty. But even when I looked at them before work, they still did not look clean. I think to myself that there will be lots of washing to do when I get home. I think of water gushing from the tap, the pleasantness of feeling clean from the inside out.

I miss running water. We don’t think much about it when we use it. We abuse it, let water run even when we are not, at that moment, using it, such as when we brush our teeth or put dishes into the draining rack after rinsing. We do it all without a second thought. What luxury!

In Mongolia, I miss running water.

There is no tap built into the camp house here in Mongolia. We have to bring water from outside to fill a large plastic bottle fitted with a plastic faucet, and it becomes a mini-water tank with a tap. We put a basin beneath the tap, to prevent water from spilling onto the floor and wasting it. We cook, we wash, and we use water minimally. At home, we may rinse our vegetables and our dishes several times, but here only once or, at most, twice; the same when we wash our clothes.

People come from afar to get water from a spring.

We tend to forget how lucky we are. Water is pretty much free. We pay only a nominal fee for the water supplied by the Hong Kong government. Some of us on this earth have sufficient water, and some do not. I hope I will remember this when I am back in Hong Kong.

How life has chosen us! It seems as if, for the most part, we have no say. I could have been a Mongolian girl or boy, born to a nomadic family, and not taken long showers whenever I felt like it. But I was born to a family in Hong Kong where, although life was hard for my parents, it hasn’t been so hard for me.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.