H2O

Yesterday my maid said to me, "Um, madame? There is something green floating in the water. Sometimes big, sometimes small." Sure, no surprise. If it comes from the tap, anything is possible. No biggie. Whatever, green, yellow, brown. Then she said, "Uh, no, this time it is coming from the water cooler. The purified water." Ah, I get it. There is reason for alarm. The only problem is, I have been drinking out of that cooler, with that particular jug, the entire day. Can't accept it. Too gross.

Gross it was. Nasty little green floaty things. Surely they were amoebas, but I hate that word amoeba. That would mean I have gross crawly things floating inside me with billions of legs (okay, maybe only a few, but still). You know, those freaky looking bugs that they always show you pictures of in science class and tell you that you have a bazillion in your bed if you don't wash your sheets regularly. Yeah, those ones. Sleeping with them is one thing, digesting them is another.

While living in Nepal you need to be flexible...with everything. And I can almost accept the fact that I drink an amoeba or two every now and then. However, I have one condition, I don't want to see it. In this case, the rule has been broken, and now I am grossed out.

After emptying out the jug and replacing it with a nice, new, clean one, I sat and eat my dinner. There I sat, wondering if the food I was eating was going to feed the little suckers and make them bigger. Again, gross. Then I thought about my children drinking from the cooler today. All the times I passed them a glass thinking I was helping them hydrate. Instead, I was just a bug pusher.

Luckily, I did more of an inspection and discovered that it was just a cracked jug which allowed all the dirt and grime to seep into our water. Yeah, just Nepali dirt! (That probably has bile and loogies and that kind of stuff in it). But it is the dirt I see with my naked eye, not amoebas.

Oh, phew, I feel so much better.