If you use a gallon for drinking water at home, what happens to it once the water runs out? Do you take it back to your usual refill station? Sell it to a scrap collector? Or simply throw it away?
In Tepus Village, Gunungkidul, a water gallon like the one in your kitchen takes on a very different journey when the dry season arrives.
When the dry season comes, water no longer flows from the tap. Instead, it arrives by water tanker and is transferred into gallons that community members carry home by hand, transport by bicycle, or carry on their shoulders.
Image: Community member collected water from a communal water tank
For those who can afford to buy water, it is usually delivered directly to a storage tank at home. A 5,000-litre tank costs around IDR 130,000. Even that amount of water is often only enough to meet basic household needs.
For Sutriyana, a female farmer in Tepus, the need for water becomes even greater when she also has to provide water for her livestock. Her six goats are the family’s savings, kept for unexpected expenses, especially her children’s school costs. But this year’s dry season has been harsher than usual. The grass on the hills is no longer enough, forcing her to buy three bundles of feed every day. The savings she had hoped to preserve are now being used simply to get by, especially to buy water.
However, buying water is not an option that everyone can afford. For some communities, water is not purchased but delivered to communal water tanks. From there, fill used drinking-water gallons and carry them home by hand or on their shoulders. One trip is rarely enough; they have to go back and forth between their homes and the communal tank to meet their daily water needs.
In households where only older people live alone, they too have to carry the gallons home themselves.
Image: Empty drinking-water gallons pile up in a community member’s kitchen
Once the water runs out, the gallons return to waiting in the corners of communities’ homes. Waiting for the next water tanker to arrive and fill the communal tank, as it has during previous dry seasons.
The gallon in your kitchen may simply be waiting for a refill station or a scrap collector. In Tepus, those gallons are waiting for the next water delivery.