The Water Bottle - UG vs US

My celebration earlier this week about my boxes being done.....was a bit premature.  Sigh.  Machine broke, behind schedule, blah, blah, blah.  Philip has ASSURED me they will be done by next Friday.  Did I already say sigh?  So my fingers are crossed for next week, but I'm not really holding my breath.

However!  Things are shaping up despite that.  Meet Jimmy:

Jimmy is my hero of the week.  He owns the popular local pub that does a trivia night every Thursday.  A couple weeks ago I had a conversation with him about my recycling project and he was very supportive and told me to come his way when I was ready.  Well, Wednesday night I got a phone call from him; "Morgan, I have very many bottles for you.  And tomorrow is a big night, so I don't think I'll be able to store them any longer. Do you think you can come get them, or should I dispose of them?"

Jimmy is quite proud of his pub's grounds - he is considering changing the name of the pub to The Green House  

"You're already saving them for me?  Amazing!  I will come get them tomorrow for sure."  So I arranged with St Monicas to meet me at the pub in the afternoon, I brought my gigantic sack, (see last week's post) we filled it with bottles, and they were carted off to become bricks for a new hut.  Awesome, right?  I'm just so happy that it's working already, before I can even put as much energy into as I would like.

Jimmy and an employee tossing the empty bottles into my over-sized bag.  They're storing them in that broken freezer.  Awesome.  

My friend Elizabeth - who works at St Monicas - was surprised by how many bottles were collected in one week by one establishment, and said, "Oh man, we're going to have to hire more people to start filling bottles!"  Which thing I could not be happier to hear.  That's the idea, right?  Build the economy, protect the environment, strengthen the people.  I can't tell you how happy that makes my heart.

That is a lot of bottles!  You can't really tell from the photo - but that enormous sack is about  one-third full.  

I can say however, looking at all those bottles got me thinking.  And here is where I get just a bit preachy, so if you want to check out now, feel free.  Here in Gulu there are very limited options for safe drinking water.  It's inconvenient not to use bottled water at best, and impossible at worst.  But in the States, when is the last time you heard about someone getting sick because they drank tap water?  OK, so all my siblings and I did get sick once as kids drinking from a pump at a park that had a sewage leak....ew...but that is the RAREST case.  In fact, I'm willing to bet I am now one of the only people you know that has ever been sick from drinking water in the US.  So what I am asking is why do we feel the need to drink so much bottled water when we have such abundant safe drinking water already available?  People will argue that there are other things in their water they don't want to ingest: rust, chlorine, yadda, yadda, yadda.  Guess what?  Bottled water contains all kinds of other things you don't want to ingest: the plastic leaches all sorts of nastiness into the water, (including arsenic?!?) particularly if it's had a day in the sun or a hot car.  Also, did you know that nearly all bottled water in America comes straight from your tap-water source anyway?  In nearly every state it's just filtered from tap water - and then put in toxic bottles and sold to you when  you could be drinking it free!  (Without arsenic!)  So why not just filter your own water!?  And if you want the toxins, you can store it in your own plastic bottle for free!  :-)  Or you can use glass or a stainless steal water bottle.

 Seriously though, I'm going to ask for another couple favors; A. Look into your local water source and see what the water contains.  If it's clean, drink up!  B. If there's stuff you'd rather not have in your own water, use a tap filter.  C. If you have to use bottled water (which if you're like me and carry a water bottle with you everywhere will be a very rare occasion,) please don't let my efforts here be in vain and recycle that little bottle!  (Maybe even after reusing it!)  If I haven't convinced you, you should really check out the documentary Tapped and let them try.  I watched it via instant stream on Netflix (oh, the days I used to have Netflix accessibility....)

OK, done preaching.  Thanks for sticking with me through that.  Now, leave me some awesome actually-I-did-get-sick-from-tap-water stories in the comments, or, even better, let me know of your very valiant efforts not to use bottled water.  Thanks for reading!