Travel Journal, 8

We gazed back and forth—at the well, then up at the water storage tank. The only running water the farm had was a well system at the far end of a property. As water filled the well, a windmill pumped the water up and out, into a water storage tank 25-feet in the air. From there, the water gravity fed the Hacienda and the rest of the buildings.

For the past week, we had been experiencing reduced water pressure. And nobody knew why. So, there we stood, investigating. It was finally decided that the best course of action was to climb the tower and peer into the 600-gallon tank. We soon discovered that the tank was full of crystal-clear well-water. However, the two-and-a-half-inch pipe which fed the property was plugged.

Something was in there.

I might mention now that though my Spanish had improved greatly since I began living in Bolivia, there were still many words I did not understand. To make matters worse, the local dialect was awash with a rich Quechua vocabulary.

We both hung off the side of the sky-high tank trying to come up with a plan. It was decided that he would cut the pipe with a hack saw and I would hold my hand against the end of the pipe, holding back thousands of pounds of water.

Brilliant.

Surprisingly, it worked. Not because of my brute strength. But because of science reasons which to this day elude me.

As I gaped at my uncanny ability to stem this watery force of nature, I looked up and saw that my fellow tank repairer’s face turned an unpleasant shade of green. He looked up from the end of the pipe and coarsely whispered, “ch’uwaku.”

Not a Spanish word.

I scraped the bottom of my mind this new word and meaning. I asked for clarification and to my horror, found out that a bird (ch’uwaku) had died, been sucked into the tube, and evidently plugged our water source.

In silence, we finished repairing the tank. He disappeared and later returned with a jug of bleach. As he poured a ¼ cup into the tank, he looked up at me and said in a mix of Quechua and Spanish, ” bird water.”

anthony forrest