This tunnel I'm laying in is the tunnel dug by Hezekiah's men. It leads to the cistern which was one of the keys to keeping the people alive during times of war. Location Location is important but during times of war the cistern is the true key that decides who wins the battle.
Before I get too invested in my next post I want to educate you all just incase you aren't sure what a cistern is. I went to Israel just 2 months ago so I saw all the ancient cisterns to last me a lifetime. But apparently I haven't experienced enough of them because they fallowed me all the way to Ometepec. Yes that's right they have them here as well. So you may be asking "what is a cistern?"
So if you have any question this might help give you at least a modern look at a cistern. It collects the rain water and then filters and cycles it back around into your houses so that you don't have to buy water. Down here it is raining for another 3 weeks and, from what the locals are telling me la lluvia(Rain) is going to stop for the next 10 months. When I first arrived I thought I was going to be living in a jungle, since it rains every 36 hours or so. But everything is going to "start" getting brown in about 3 month. Late Abril(April) is when everything is going to be extremely brown. Moving on, with more important topics. The Wood family and I have been on water conservation for the last 2 weeks because it has officially be a month since the city has delivered water to the house. It hasn't been a state of alarm but if the rain season ends and we still don't have water we're in trouble. But until we get water we have to be very strategic about when we flush the toilet(It's got to be brown to flush it down), Laundry water is kept to use later to fill and flush the toilet, Showers are short and most the time the water is turned off and used only to rinse of all those soap sudds. I've been feeling guilty for all the times that I pee and then forget to not flush. Who really thinks about that stuff? I never knew that was going to be a habit I would have to break when I was down here.
Today we got a lot of rain. It rain hard for about 2 hours. It drizzled for another 4 hours, to relieve some of the pressures we've had with water conservation. The reason we got so much water collected was because it rained for so long today. Unfortunately one of our big collection pools was clogged and not draining water to the cistern. So Andy and I tried everything from blowing air down the pipe. Sucking water up out of the pipe. WE got so desperate that we tried pushing the plug out with air using a scuba tank. None of those solved the problem so I started hawling buckets from one collection pool to another. It was about a 200 ft walk across the lawn down a big hill but it was worth it. I made 24 buckets trips back and forth. Hawling 8 gallons of water each trip. You do the math 1 gallon of water wieghs 8.36 pounds. But if you don't have a calculator and want to know the answer it was just over 3/4 ton of water. Or the running number would be 1605.00 That was a lot of water. Now I don't feel so guilty when I take a shower or flush the toilet. Have a great day everyone and remember how amazing it feels to flush a toilet and run clean water. It's so easily taken for granted, until it's taken away.
I still can't imagine being an Israelite in B.C. or A.D.
Scott Ekstrom
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