Making Water

Practically the first thing travelers seem to become aware of in any country is the water quality. Everyone knows, for example, that you shouldn’t drink the water straight from the tap in Mexico unless you are jonesing for a case of Montezuma’s Revenge.

Arizonans who travel abroad sometimes tend to generalize this to all foreign countries. My mother once had a student ask her if it was ok to drink the water in France. My mother, bemused, assured the student that the EU had higher water quality standards than the U.S.

What is interesting to me is how much water quality varies among developing countries. Water purity seems to depend more on accidents of nature than infrastructure development. In Armenia, where the water comes from sources high in the mountains, everyone drinks tap water. The water in Armenia tastes better than Tempe tap water, and I don’t think I ever got sick from it. My friend Derek says it is the same situation in Kyrgyzstan, which is also a mountainous country.

Meanwhile, Russia, which has a per capita GDP about three times that of Armenia and twelve times that of Kyrgyzstan, has famously toxic tap water. Even in St. Petersburg you can get girardia (a wicked parasite that will have you running for the bathroom for several months) from drinking the tap water without boiling it. The Russian woman I lived with seemed to think there was something inherently wrong with drinking water from the tap, no matter how hard I tried to explain that in lots of other countries you won’t get sick from the tap water. (Of course, her solution was boiling water and putting it in a little jar with a silver spoon in it. Never quite figured that one out, but it seemed pretty gross to me, considering all the strange sediment that collected on the bottom of the jar.)

I think that one can entirely explain the Russian obsession with tea with their poor water quality. People there seem to think it is actually unhealthy and even weird to drink plain, clean water. (I know!!!) Meanwhile, tea is the elixir of life. Go figure.

The situation in Moldova seems better than Russia, but not by much. Locals and foreigners alike avoid drinking the tap water, opting for filtered water or store-bought water instead. Today I finally bought myself a water filter so I could stop lugging 5 liter jugs of water to and from the store every week.

Once you have a water filter, you must do the activity that Stephanie, my fellow Fulbrighter, calls “making water.” First, you have to boil the water to kill all the critters. Then, you have to wait for the water to cool and the pour it in the filter. Ta-da! Potable water.

I consider myself lucky to live in Comrat, actually. In Ciadir-Lunga, the next town over, water apparently comes out of the tap yellow. People have to go to special taps in the city center to get free water that you can actually drink. Yikes.