Nepal and Water

Nepal and Water

By Mike Lilly

Kudos Magazine Special Edition 2016

Long before Flint’s water emergency, I learned how crucial — and how precious — clean, safe drinking water can be.
From 2007 -2012, I lived and worked in Nepal, a Third World country. My wife, Sushma, was born and raised in Kathmandu. Together, we worked as social activists focusing on educating children and their health and welfare.
Water in Nepal
In our home in Nepal, we had little or no electricity most days, continual gas shortages and always, always water shortages.
Every Tuesday at 5:30 a.m., a man on a bicycle delivered two five-gallon containers of water to our home — a luxury that not all our neighbors could afford.
Even then, we did not take water for granted. During monsoon season we harvested rainwater, storing all we could in a big tank to use when there was no water or there were political disruptions by the Maoist insurgents who regularly shut down the country.
We always had to boil our water before we used it. We always had to ration and reuse our water.
We made do.