Fresh water tanker (credit: Preeti Singh)

On a stiflingly hot day at the end of May, the tour company’s blissfully air-conditioned Suzuki SUV slowed down to a stop along a dirt road leading to our destination, a water-side resort on the coast of Kerala, near the southern tip of India.  What could be the trouble?  Broken down car, livestock lingering in the road, plain old traffic?

It was a traffic jam, but one that consisted of a shiny TATA tanker truck parked in the narrow lane, dozens and dozens of plastic buckets and curved steel pots of all sizes, and people who seemed to be racing against time to make sure every one of those containers in the road was filled with fresh water.

I’d spent the previous few days marveling at the amount of water everywhere I looked in Kerala, from the extensive backwaters on which the tourist houseboats motored toward evening thunderstorms that wet the landscape but provided no escape from the humidity.

I had seen a pair of women doing laundry on the stone steps that occasionally cut the canal wall down to the water’s edge, the stones convenient for rubbing the soap deeply into the clothes and the water for rinsing afterward.

I’d seen an elderly man bathing on another set of canal steps once the sun started to set and it no longer seemed so pointless to take a chance on cleanliness.

I myself had found huge bottles of chilled, filtered water ubiquitous in roadside shops and restaurants.

But to see people scrambling for water?

Containers for water (credit: Preeti Singh)

Although I had a million questions—Why wasn’t there infrastructure for tap water? How often did the truck come? How much did this cost them? What did they do if they ran out?—I waited, silently watching until the road cleared, to keep forging ahead to the resort that didn’t lack for a single amenity from a swimming pool to hot showers.

But this nagged at me. Later that night, I Googled safe drinking water in Kerala and learned that although this state gets three times more rainfall than the rest of India, topography allows 40 percent of it to flow into the sea. Growing population pressure means the remaining amount of water is insufficient to meet people’s needs.

But through World Bank funding to the state government over the last many years, communities were to devise and manage their own water supply schemes. More than 3,000 of these projects were reported as of 2008.

I can now hope that the seemingly desperate scene I encountered was actually a home-grown solution to provide safe drinking water in the community. And I hope it wasn’t the symptom of a terrible natural resource and infrastructure crisis driving the poor to suffer unimaginable illness and thirst.

The only certainty I do have is that staying in my air-conditioned cocoon didn’t, and of course couldn’t, yield the answers to my lingering questions.

Goat Skinning (credit: Matt Gruenburg)

Their hands acted almost independently, knowing just where to insert the knife and just how to break the joints, so the whole process was smooth, clean, and calm.

Lo and I were walking through the medina in Tangier, at the mouth of the Mediterranean on Morocco’s northern coast, when I saw a ring in one of the jeweler’s stores that was nearly big enough around for two of my fingers. What woman, I wondered, could possibly wear a ring that big? Haven’t you noticed the women’s hands here? Lo replied. It wasn’t until several days later, in Ain Chaib, that I understood.

The trip from Tangier to Ain Chaib, a village with just over 1,000 people in southern Morocco, consisted of an overnight train ride to Marrakech–a frantic city of stifling heat on the high plains–a five-hour bus ride farther southwest, up over the High Atlas Mountains to the coastal city of Agadir, and, finally, an hour riding in the back of a worn-out Mercedes Benz taxi, shoulder to shoulder with five other passengers headed home to villages and towns sprinkled along the highway.

We stayed with the same extended family, nearly 40 members across three generations, that Lo lived with during her service in the Peace Corps two years earlier. Family members cycled through the main house throughout the day, but for lunch and dinner everyone gathered.

Beyond taste and smell, every meal the family prepared was a tactile experience. Once one of the aunts or nieces placed the tagine, a conical clay dish used to cook many meals, in the middle of the table, another family member would take several rounds of hubz, a type of flat bread made by hand that morning by one of the women in the family, and tear them in half, and then in half again, giving everyone several rough quarters with which to scoop food. Tearing the hubz into perfect, bite-sized pieces with just my right hand, as even the youngest cousins were able to manage, required more dexterity than I was able to muster at first. Trying to gather tiny grains of couscous into a single, edible ball–again, with just one hand–proved even more difficult.

One morning, Elgada, the 70-year-old grandmother of the family, cracked Argan nuts to begin the process of making oil, which they use to add a smooth, nutty flavor to many dishes. Nearly blind from diabetes, Elgada sat on the ground, and with one stone balanced on her lap and a smaller one held in her right hand, she split open a nut she held pinched between her left index finger and thumb. Her calloused fingers then deftly separated the nut from the shell. As I sat in the shaded courtyard to avoid the heat, I watched her do this dozens of times without missing once. Years of doing this had given her the precision required to avoid smashing her fingers between two rocks.

Cracking Nuts (credit: Flickr user mgilbir)

The Sunday we were in the village, two of the brothers slaughtered and butchered a goat to make lunch and dinner for the family. Slaughtering a goat usually happens at the end of Ramadan, or for a birth or wedding, but I wanted to see it, to experience the ritual, so we helped the brothers pay for one. As they worked together to corral the goat, cut its neck, peel the skin back and remove the innards, there was little hesitation in any of their motions. Their hands acted almost independently, knowing just where to insert the knife and just how to break the joints, so the whole process was smooth, clean, and calm. In fact, the hands often seemed to lead the body, making quick work of a particularly odorous process and belying the grimaces on their faces.

Hands here made bread every morning, poured tea, slaughtered goats, peeled pricklypear fruits, all with an ease that could not come naturally to me. Some women in the village make jewelry, and those in other villages in the region weave carpets, or silversmith, all requiring dexterity and flexibility I can only admire.

In the two years since Lo had been in the village, the Internet has made its way to Ain Chaib. The family can now email a sister in Memphis without traveling to the nearby town, Ouled Teima, a 45-minute walk across an open, dry, dusty field. But the distance between the two communities won’t last. Ouled Teima is creeping toward Ain Chaib, extending a skeleton of development across the fields. A grid of roads, with a forest of solitary lamp posts at each corner, populates the otherwise barren landscape. In two more years, houses, families, markets, and taxi stands may fill the space.

Though the ring I marveled at in Tangier might fit the women in Ain Chaib, their fingers and palms large and muscled from years of  work, none of the women I met were wearing anything like it. Most will never go to Tangier. But Tangier is coming to them. And when it does, I wonder how their work, and their hands, will change.

Camels in Field (credit: Matt Gruenburg)