Since coming to Haiti, a number of words have found their way into my everyday vocabulary. Delko is the Haitian word for generator, largely because the first generators here were 'A.C. Delco.' EDH is what folks in Ontario call hydro and what our friends in Michigan simply called electricity. Gaz is fairly easy to figure out, although the twist is that it is nearly always propane and not natural gas like many North Americans use to heat their homes. And then there is dlo. Water. My guess is that the Creole word 'dlo' is a derivation of the French "de l'eau" for "some water." Whenever I see the word 'dlo' it makes me laugh, the economy of letters to write the word, the simplicity that is so uniquely Haitian.
But when I think about dlo, then things are not simple, in a way that is also uniquely Haitian. You've all seen the Facebook postings of the little boy from a developing world asking incredulously about the uses of water in what is commonly referred to as First World (I think 'The Hunger Games' would call it "The Capitol.") The little boy in the Facebook posting says, "What? You mean to tell me you use perfectly clean water to....wash your human waste to the sewer....clean your car....dump over your head in a challenge to not have to give money away...." or something to that effect. When I think about the uses of water that I have been used to the first 48-1/2 years of my life, it is now shocking to me as I think about how precious dlo is here.
Let me tell you how we get our dlo here and what it takes. First, dlo comes to our home two ways, and neither is by pipeline. Dlo can be delivered by truck or by weather. All over Port-au-Prince, the vehicles to avoid in traffic are the dlo trucks. They are everywhere and they are big. And, as my colleague Zachary King likes to point out, "they make their money from going, not stopping, so you can't trust that their brakes work." A dlo truck can carry 2500 gallons which costs 2500 Haitian gourdes or about $62.50. If I lived further up the mountain, it would cost more; further down would cost less. Turns out you are paying for the gas to get it to your house as much as you are paying for the water.
Ordering a truck of dlo is a matter of calling them up and giving your address. A few hours later, they arrive. Since our cistern (the concrete tank in the ground at our home) is at the back corner of our house, it takes both the 4" hoses of the dlo truck to get the cistern, and even then the driver needs to position the truck just right with the front wheel right up against the barb-wire-topped wall around our yard. Rolling out the dlo hoses, two workers position the hoses neatly around our vehicle and plants to extend to the cistern. Then, while worker #2 holds the hose in the top of the cistern, the driver crawls under the dlo truck, which upon closer inspection I notice is partly held together with a wooden 4x4, not exactly inspiring confidence. Under the dlo truck, the driver turns a gear which opens the tank into the hose and the dlo begins to pour. Most of it ends up in the cistern, but dlo truck hoses in Haiti also do a lot of spraying through the holes they have accumulated, and so we find that the dlo truck does a nice job of irrigating our plants along the side of our home, which saves us some effort later on.
Some days dlo simply falls from the sky - "free dlo" - and when it hits our roof it finds its way to a series of downspouts which deliver the dlo directly to the cistern. And so now, you might think, that is how we get our water. But we are not done. What we are accustomed to back home are two other conveniences that go with dlo -- water pressure and water purity.
Let's start with water pressure. On days that we have EDH (remember, hydro, or electricity?), we can go outside to one of our outbuildings and turn on a pump that will send the dlo from the cistern to the two dlo tanks on the roof. On days we do not have EDH, we can turn on the Delko (generator), making sure it has deisel in it, and then flip the switch in the house from EDH to Delko and then go back outside to the pump room and switch on the pump to pump the dlo up to the roof. We would then let the pump run for approximately 45 minutes until we began to hear dlo running back down the downspouts into the cistern telling us that the roof tanks are overflowing.
Now that the dlo is on the roof, we have pressure, but we still don't have purity. And we don't make all of our dlo pure, that would be too time-consuming and too costly. So we have clean dlo and pure dlo. Clean dlo is what we would call the water in the tanks. It is clean enough for all things not related to our mouths. Clean dlo is clean enough to flush toilets with or shower with or water the plants with, and so clean dlo is what runs through our pipes. But, clean dlo would make us sick to drink it. Or to brush our teeth with. Or make ice tea, or ice cubes or to wash dishes or our faces. For that, we need pure dlo.
Pure dlo -- and we drink a lot: today I had my usual 4 x 32 oz bottles to stave off heat or supply my sweat glands, not sure which -- pure dlo is a precious commodity and a bit more work, involving both of our staff in our house. On Tuesday and Fridays, Nanotte purifies dlo. Nanotte is a wonderful lady who works in our home and does much of the laundry, cooking, and some cleaning. We have six 5 gallon "water cooler" jugs and approximately 30-40 1 gallon jugs. To fill them, she runs 'clean dlo' through a series of two filters -- first a carbon filter water purifier and then an Ultraviolet purifier - and into these jugs. These jugs are then either brought indoors by Gusman, a fine young man who works in our home, with the 5 gallon jugs lining the end of the main floor hall and the 1 gallon jugs packing the cavernous space beneath our kitchen sink. Some of these 1 gallon jugs are brought to the bathrooms where there are picnic cooler jugs (the kind with spouts at the bottom) beside the sinks which are then filled, ready to be used for brushing teeth, washing faces, or taking pills. The five gallon jugs take their turns being mounted on top of the dlo cooler (which only works when we have EDH, electricity) so that we can all fill our many water bottles for our daily drinking.
So, that's dlo. Or, at least as much as I know about dlo before the rainy season starts here. Then, I am guessing, I will have a lot more to say; and my guess is that I will need to call the dlo truck much less, too.
Thanks for visiting,
John
But when I think about dlo, then things are not simple, in a way that is also uniquely Haitian. You've all seen the Facebook postings of the little boy from a developing world asking incredulously about the uses of water in what is commonly referred to as First World (I think 'The Hunger Games' would call it "The Capitol.") The little boy in the Facebook posting says, "What? You mean to tell me you use perfectly clean water to....wash your human waste to the sewer....clean your car....dump over your head in a challenge to not have to give money away...." or something to that effect. When I think about the uses of water that I have been used to the first 48-1/2 years of my life, it is now shocking to me as I think about how precious dlo is here.
Let me tell you how we get our dlo here and what it takes. First, dlo comes to our home two ways, and neither is by pipeline. Dlo can be delivered by truck or by weather. All over Port-au-Prince, the vehicles to avoid in traffic are the dlo trucks. They are everywhere and they are big. And, as my colleague Zachary King likes to point out, "they make their money from going, not stopping, so you can't trust that their brakes work." A dlo truck can carry 2500 gallons which costs 2500 Haitian gourdes or about $62.50. If I lived further up the mountain, it would cost more; further down would cost less. Turns out you are paying for the gas to get it to your house as much as you are paying for the water.
Ordering a truck of dlo is a matter of calling them up and giving your address. A few hours later, they arrive. Since our cistern (the concrete tank in the ground at our home) is at the back corner of our house, it takes both the 4" hoses of the dlo truck to get the cistern, and even then the driver needs to position the truck just right with the front wheel right up against the barb-wire-topped wall around our yard. Rolling out the dlo hoses, two workers position the hoses neatly around our vehicle and plants to extend to the cistern. Then, while worker #2 holds the hose in the top of the cistern, the driver crawls under the dlo truck, which upon closer inspection I notice is partly held together with a wooden 4x4, not exactly inspiring confidence. Under the dlo truck, the driver turns a gear which opens the tank into the hose and the dlo begins to pour. Most of it ends up in the cistern, but dlo truck hoses in Haiti also do a lot of spraying through the holes they have accumulated, and so we find that the dlo truck does a nice job of irrigating our plants along the side of our home, which saves us some effort later on.
 |
| Inspires confidence, doesn't it? (fyi, stock photo, not our wall, but similar) |
Some days dlo simply falls from the sky - "free dlo" - and when it hits our roof it finds its way to a series of downspouts which deliver the dlo directly to the cistern. And so now, you might think, that is how we get our water. But we are not done. What we are accustomed to back home are two other conveniences that go with dlo -- water pressure and water purity.
Let's start with water pressure. On days that we have EDH (remember, hydro, or electricity?), we can go outside to one of our outbuildings and turn on a pump that will send the dlo from the cistern to the two dlo tanks on the roof. On days we do not have EDH, we can turn on the Delko (generator), making sure it has deisel in it, and then flip the switch in the house from EDH to Delko and then go back outside to the pump room and switch on the pump to pump the dlo up to the roof. We would then let the pump run for approximately 45 minutes until we began to hear dlo running back down the downspouts into the cistern telling us that the roof tanks are overflowing.
Now that the dlo is on the roof, we have pressure, but we still don't have purity. And we don't make all of our dlo pure, that would be too time-consuming and too costly. So we have clean dlo and pure dlo. Clean dlo is what we would call the water in the tanks. It is clean enough for all things not related to our mouths. Clean dlo is clean enough to flush toilets with or shower with or water the plants with, and so clean dlo is what runs through our pipes. But, clean dlo would make us sick to drink it. Or to brush our teeth with. Or make ice tea, or ice cubes or to wash dishes or our faces. For that, we need pure dlo.
Pure dlo -- and we drink a lot: today I had my usual 4 x 32 oz bottles to stave off heat or supply my sweat glands, not sure which -- pure dlo is a precious commodity and a bit more work, involving both of our staff in our house. On Tuesday and Fridays, Nanotte purifies dlo. Nanotte is a wonderful lady who works in our home and does much of the laundry, cooking, and some cleaning. We have six 5 gallon "water cooler" jugs and approximately 30-40 1 gallon jugs. To fill them, she runs 'clean dlo' through a series of two filters -- first a carbon filter water purifier and then an Ultraviolet purifier - and into these jugs. These jugs are then either brought indoors by Gusman, a fine young man who works in our home, with the 5 gallon jugs lining the end of the main floor hall and the 1 gallon jugs packing the cavernous space beneath our kitchen sink. Some of these 1 gallon jugs are brought to the bathrooms where there are picnic cooler jugs (the kind with spouts at the bottom) beside the sinks which are then filled, ready to be used for brushing teeth, washing faces, or taking pills. The five gallon jugs take their turns being mounted on top of the dlo cooler (which only works when we have EDH, electricity) so that we can all fill our many water bottles for our daily drinking.
 |
| Remember to first fill your cup with water before putting your toothbrush in your hand so that you don't accidentally use 'clean' dlo instead of 'pure' dlo :) -- so far, none of us has made the mistake which would likely make us sick. |
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| Even though it only cools the dlo when EDH is on, this little machine is one of the most useful things in our home, filling each our water bottles multiple times per day. |
Thanks for visiting,
John
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