The Weight of Water

One of the most common sights in rural Kenya is a woman or girl carrying water on her head. People here will tell you that "water is life" and it is for that reason that women will walk for miles if needed to keep their families alive. In America water comes out of a tap in your kitchen, bathroom or a hose you hooked up to water your lawn. If you're lucky your water comes chilled out of a tap on your refrigerator door along with several kinds of ice. As an added benefit the water coming out of the tap and into your glass has been treated, meaning you won't be exposed to water borne diseases such as dysentery (I can tell you from experience you should count yourself lucky if you can avoid that one). Americans tend to use a lot of water. We use it to cook, wash clothes and bathe like people do here but in larger quantities. In Kenya you might use 10 liters of water for a bucket bath. I don't know how much is used in the average shower, but it's more than 10 liters, as is the capacity of your standard bathtub. Perhaps if Americans had to carry their bath water on their heads even just 1 or 2 blocks, they too would use less. I know I would because water is heavy. A liter of water has a mass of 1 kilogram, or roughly 2.2 lbs. Typically I never carried more than a 1 liter water bottle with me in America, but I did notice that it made my purse heavier. In Kenya I carry considerably more than 1 liter and I'm only an amateur. To get the water I use I have to options. I can leave buckets and basins out when it rains (which I do) or I can use one of the wells near my house. If the well outside my house has relatively clear water I can carry my water using my hands in small (10 liter) quantities making multiple trips if needed, which would only happen if I was doing laundry (I use 10 liters when washing my clothes by hand). So when I haul water out of the well by my house I am hauling roughly 22 lbs of water. 10 liters is also the smallest amount of water carried on one's head here, and typically it would be carried by a child. If I have to get water from another compound, like almost everyone in my community, then I carry it on my head. Carrying 10 liters is not too much of a problem, the hardest part for me at least is getting the bucket on my head because my arms can barely reach the top of the bucket once it has been lifted onto my head. I generally don't have to walk very far and there are no hills in my way so it's not too complicated. The more standard amounts of water to carry are 15 and 20 liters. If you're using a bucket it's more likely you would be carrying 15 as many don't hold 20 liters and you are less likely to fill it to the brim as you wouldn't want any of the precious commodity to spill. I can carry 15 liters on my head, which I think is acceptable considering that the water weighs roughly 33 lbs and is about 1/3 of my body weight (I was 105 lbs at our Close of Service medical). There are girls here though that must be 15 lbs lighter than me carrying 20 liters (44 lbs) which is insane because that's half of their body weight. When I was preparing to climb Mt. Kenya I read that it's not good to carry more than 25% of your body weight when hiking, which is what women and girls here are doing when carrying water. They are going up and down hills, though fields, down roads etc. balancing large quantities of weight on their heads and making it look effortless. Between carrying water, working in the fields, hauling and chopping firewood and all of the other tasks that make up their daily routine the women are hard working and strong yet friendly and eager to help out. Water isn't the only thing carried on heads here. I have carried firewood, baskets of dried corn kernels, brush etc. but here's a list of some of the common and/or strange things I've seen: food to be sold at the market, bundles of clothes, gas tanks, giant clay pots, a desk, tin sheets for roofing--I'll let you know if I see/remember anything else!