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.

Kerala Houseboat (credit: Preeti Singh)

Wangari Maathai talks about a hummingbird helping put out a forest fire.  I tried to be a hummingbird on another issue once and had my beak taped shut.

I took a special trip to India earlier this year – special because it involved relatives who almost never see each other to be together for a week.  Three of us headed from dry, dusty, blazing-hot New Delhi to the lushly green, humid, blazing-hot Kerala. This southern state is famous for its calm “backwaters” that are plied by deliberately rustic, thatched-roof, wooden tourist houseboats once designed to transport rice harvests.

On the first of the seven-day trip, one of my relatives began having dreadful intestinal issues, including pain and cramping that almost immobilized him. All he wanted in life then was a constantly-refilled bottle of filtered water and long naps on the padded benches on the houseboat’s covered deck.  “This will go away on its own,” he said, not realizing how troubling it was for me to see him in pain.

It took me one day to convince him—or for him to convince himself—that my cache of the antibiotic Cipro, left over from a recent trip to Gabon where it hadn’t been needed, might be the fastest way to not spend the rest of precious vacation time in a fog of misery.

Years of reading about the rapid evolution of drug-resistant disease organisms—ranging from the parasite that causes malaria to the bacteria that causes staph infections—had me handing him the bottle of white tablets with a warning: take a week’s worth even if you start to feel better.  I figure it’s every person’s individual responsibility not to abuse antibiotics and, if they must use them, to take an entire course of medication as indicated. Otherwise, we’re told, when you stop early you’ve killed most of the bacteria but left behind the sturdiest, which will then be the ones that flourish and become harder to kill the next time around in a vicious cycle that will be eventually leave us without effective drugs.  It is happening every day.

But this prodigy of worldly sophistication handed me back the remaining pills after two days.  “Thank you,” he said, “but I feel well now and the side effects of these pills are now what’s making me feel bad.”  How bad could it be?  Unfortunately, India is advanced enough in communications that we could use a USB-stick-modem to connect our laptop to the internet in the middle of a relaxing houseboat cruise.  So, nausea, vomiting, dizziness or drowsiness.  But think selflessly, I urged. You’re helping keep Cipro viable against stomach bugs well into the future for other people, ones who might be too poor to afford anything better once the cheap, once-reliable standbys stop working, I pleaded.

But it didn’t work. I felt helpless—I cannot imagine what doctors and nurses go through with TB patients who, for example, have to show up at clinics over the course of 6 to 10 months to take really unpleasant combinations of pills in order to beat the disease, when I can’t get a sophisticated person like my relative to adhere to a simple treatment regimen.  I guess now I understand a little better why there isn’t just drug-resistant tuberculosis, or even multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, but extensively multi-drug resistant TB ravaging various corners of the world today.

I lost on this one, but won’t mean I won’t try again given the opportunity.