Uh. . . . what?
Apparently, the water system here involves having a cisterna, or cistern, which a house uses to store water. Our cisterna (pictured below) looks like a large concrete box and sits on top of our house.
Someone (not sure who, but I'm guessing it's The Man or one of his Honduran affiliates) refills this tank when we are not looking. This struck me as odd because, technically, there's a possibility of simply running out of water. We don't know who refills it, so we could be stuck for days: shower-less, pasta-less, tea-less. There's a lot of trust built into this cisterna system.
Likewise, it is also possible to run out of drinking water. Each household, not just the germ-a-phobic North Americans, uses plastic Bubbler tanks to store purified drinking water. When the water in the tank is gone, one has to run to the local pulpería (sort of like a convenient store/kiosk) and exchange the empty tank for a full one. However, if one doesn't have a car, the water usage can get tricky; it is not safe to walk around on the streets, even in the "suburbs" where I live. Plus, the pulperías aren't open all night. So, there are times when one simply cannot access proper drinking water. At the Halloween party, for instance, Casa Gigante ran out of purified water and no one brought beverages. Literally, there was nothing to drink.
For this reason, most Honduran households drink a lot of Coke (instead of the dreaded Pepsi). Hondurans think it's strange to carry water all the time. Even the poorest of families do not cut Coca Cola out of their budget, but bring it home by the 3-liter. I assume that, before good water storage, most people developed a precedent for maintaining a supply of store-bought beverages. The idea of drinking Coke (rumored to completely dissolve rusty nails) like water is shocking to me, especially when I think of the health fuss soda has created in schools in recent years. The Honduran Coke fetish reminds me of Medieval families that (children included) used to drink beer constantly due to a lack of safe drinking water. In these moments, I realize that few people have the privilege of simply reaching for their Nalgene bottles whenever parched. While I am never truly in danger of complete water deprivation here in Tegucigalpa, it's scary how few steps one unwittingly takes to reach that point.
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On a quirky side-note, this is our pila:
Doesn't it look like one of those fancy/creepy baptismal pools?
I suppose I can clarify: cisterna, or bomba, as it's much more regularly called in my experience, is hooked up to the city waterworks. However, to limit the water, entire neighborhoods are only allowed access to the water "mainframe," as it were, a few days a week. This enables true rationing, if necessary, during dry season, as well as just making sure the entire city isn't accessing water at the same time. Usually, when the city water is turned on, the water pressure is much greater than with the gravity pressure of the bomba.
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