Water

Agua, Maa, it has many names, but us English speakers call it water. The stuff that we use everyday, and Jordan's running out of it. On the 13th all of the 6th graders are going to Azraq. There's a wildlife reserve, as well as a castle there and the teachers are trying to prepare us for it. They decided to do that by having us reseach 'Water Shortage in Jordan' and see what we find.

I found out that water is precious here. Most people in Jordan only get a bucket of it a week. I know that I'm in a desert and it doesn't rain much, but whenever we run out of water, we just call the embassy and they have someone hook a hose to a tank on our roof and fill it with water. Now, I can't help but think that the water we get is being taken away from someone not as fortunate.

Jordan only gets rain for around three months of the year. The rest of the year it's warm and dry, with no clouds in the sky. The rain that we get in the winter, has to last us the whole year, and we didn't get a lot of it this year.

They say that this is going to be a hard summer and we really need to cut down on the water we use, shorter showers, turning off the faucet water while you're brushing your teeth, that kind of stuff.

But there are so many bigger things that need to be done.

The Dead Sea's water level is dropping, so there are pipes leading from nearby springs, into the Dead Sea, to fill it up, but that doesn't seem to be working. All of the pipes have leaks in them, only half of the water actually ends up where it's supposed to go, and the pipes aren't being fixed.

And then there's one thing that's gotten on my nerves since we moved here. We have a boab that lives in a small house inside our garage. He carries up groceries, keeps the building nice, things like that.

He washes all the cars everyday.

No wonder we run out of water all the time, it's being used to wash perfectly clean cars everyday, and it all ends up in the street. No wonder when one day we ran out of water, and the embassy didn't have any more to bring us he stopped washing the cars. All that water was out too.

Just be thankful that you've got as much water as you need right now, and maybe you can cut down on the water you use too.

But it's going to be a long summer here in Jordan.