Do you have enough water? / You’ve got someone to bring you water, right? 

At first people were bringing us three x 600ml plastic bottles for our water, or large foil pouches of water in boxes that you might take camping. Sometimes when people would present these to us there could be something emphatic to their gesture, as if our requirement of water had been fulfilled by their offering: “You need water, and, here: I have bought you water.”

After a day or two, people realised that a 600ml bottle, for example, is not good for more than a couple of hours of hydration, and there is no real chance of using it for cleaning or bathing. Empty bottles quickly accumulated in the space, and so, initially to elevate them from the ground, we started to hang them all from the tree branch using string someone had given us. Possibly prompted by that visual display - scores of empty 600ml water bottles dangling in the breeze - when we woke up on the third day we found that someone had come while we were asleep and left us a fairly large plastic water tank - maybe 40lt?

Now we mostly use that (though people still bring bottles every day), and when it is empty, someone generally offers to fill it up for us from a nearby tap, up the hill.

Yes, that would be great, actually. Thank you very much.

We are very conscious of the amount of water we are using, though mostly by virtue of immediate limitations: sometimes there is enough to either bathe or do the washing up and we must make a decision; or we have to think about consequences like the ground to become too sodden from run-off. We have never had to be seriously worried about running out of water because it is a primary need and people always ask if we have enough. None of us have once become thirsty.

[Deliverance at the Adelaide Fringe, March 2012]