Don't drink the water/No beba el agua

Water is a big deal in the Dominican Republic. The country is still a developing nation, meaning that large portions of the population go without running water in their homes. It's not unusual to go to a home, even in Santo Domingo, and see a giant plastic barrel of water in the bathroom.

But this post is not about water resources in general in the DR. I'm going to write about drinking water: cultural attitudes, access, pricing, and other observations I have about a very necessary resource.

Let's get the big joke out of the way. You can't drink the tap water here. Just like in Mexico. At best you'll get the runs, and at worst you'll get cholera. Our neighbors to the west in Haiti are going through a horrific cholera epidemic and it's hit parts of the DR too. You can't cook with it and you can't even brush your teeth with it.

Drinking water is sold everywhere here, in 20 ounce bottles and in five gallon jugs, and all sizes in between. You can call the colmado and they'll deliver a jug to your door. We have an apparatus in the kitchen to hold the jug and make it easy to pour.

The five gallon jugs run between 50-60 pesos a pop, or about US$1.30. About what you pay at those crystal water vending machines I've seen around town in the US.

An article in a newspaper here (Hoy) published a story last week about a consumer right's group calling for drinking water distributors and bottlers to charge no more than 46 pesos per five gallon jug. The article stated that by selling the jugs for 46 pesos, supermarkets were still making 23% profit, but stores charge the 50-60 pesos I mentioned and make more. Blue Planet Water Management, a major water brand here, prints their price on each bottle: 46 pesos. And still stores and merchants jack up the cost to 50-60 pesos. The consumer group warned that sanctions would be applied to merchants who violate the plan to keep costs down.

This may not seem like a big deal, but consider this: when the water you get out of the tap can kill you, the water distribution and bottlers and merchants have you by the short hairs. I fall short of saying that tap water here is free. Utilities are still hit-or-miss in the DR and consumers still have to pay the full amounts of their bill if a service is shut off or otherwise not working properly due to the utility provider's error or some other problem not caused by the consumer.

Providing clean drinking water is essential for public health. End of story. Dominicans are forced to pay for their water. The alternative for them is severe illness and/or death.

On the flip side, I choose not to drink the tap water in San Jose because it smells like metal and tastes worse. It's disgusting, but I won't get bowel-rending diarrhea from it. I don't pay for water utilities at my apartment in the states. The landlord covers that cost for me. I go with bottled water whenever I can, usually in the gallon jugs by Crystal Geyser because they have the handy handle. But at the end of the pay period when my money is so low I can barely afford Top Ramen and there's no bottled water, I will drink the tap water because it's the best I have. I would never use bottled water for cooking or brushing my teeth in the States, either. That seems like a waste to me.

I discovered that San Lorenzo, a tiny town a little bit north of San Jose where my boyfriend's family lives, has the cleanest, freshest, best tasting tap water in the world. Whenever we can, we go up to his parents' places and fill up a ton of jugs to bring home. Free water! Good water! You'd do it too.

Dominicans don't have a choice. While I am here, neither do I. I did some quick math. Indhira and I go through about a jug of water a week here. Sometimes we can convince the internship coordinator to send water delivery service to our apartment (meaning we don't pay for it) and sometimes we can't, so we have to call the colmado ourselves. I estimate we (Indhira, the internship coordinator, or I) pays 60 pesos per jug, once a week for 15 weeks. That works out to spending a total of 900 pesos on water since I got here, about US$24 for water.

There's a cultural component to bottled water that doesn't exist here. In the US, I know as many people who buy and drink bottled water as those who do not. Not because of taste reasons, because we have Brita pitchers and those filters you can hook up to your sink--some even have flavors attached to them. There is a great cultural divide over the plastic bottle that holds your water.

You probably remember this if you saw An Inconvenient Truth. Those plastic bottles don't biodegrade. Nobody recycles. Blah blah blah. Some opportune environmentalists have taken it upon themselves to scream at you for toting around a regular old Dasani bottle instead of a reusable water bottle or small jug. My boss at the pool vetoed buying the crates of 20 ounce water bottles to spare the planet from the proliferation of mindless plastic. We got these awkward metal canteen things that don't go in the dishwasher and I hate them. They make the water taste odd. What we do in the name of sustainability...

At any rate, I actually do reuse my plastic water bottles and jugs. Since I'm in the water a few days a week and screaming my head off at my students, I need to keep my pipes hydrated. I will buy a liter Dasani bottle or a Smartwater bottle at the grocery or drug store, but I will continue to refill it with water as I drink it up. I use that bottle for quite a while. Same with the Crystal Geyser jugs, as I mentioned before. But since I contribute to the proliferation of plastic by buying a bottle of water about once a week because I inevitably forget mine somewhere, I suppose I'm part of the problem.

I'd like to see one of them come over here and see the sheer volume of bottled water. Kinda makes the problem in the US seem not so bad, doesn't it?