I went to my neighbor's store to buy drinking water, and behold, I saw the woman fetching water from her tap inside an empty bottle to be preserved in her freezer. Looking at her overhead tank, where the water is being stored, it's obvious that the tank hasn't been washed since the installation. I was curious to know if she really drinks the water from the tap without any form of treatment, considering how bad Lagos State water can be. I politely asked her, and to my greatest chagrin, she said that her husband usually buys chemicals for water treatment, and from time to time, they open their bore hole and pour the chemicals inside, then allow it to sit for some hours, and then they will start drinking it. Those few hours of their waiting are assumed to be the treatment period of the water, and that is it.
It was such an interesting revelation, and I couldn't keep calm about it, especially seeing that lots of people in our community have been going to fetch her water for drinking instead of buying the usual satchet water for drinking or even bottled water for those that can afford it.
She let the people know that she treats her water well and, therefore, there was no need to spend money on sachets or bottled water for drinking purposes. Looking at this from an angle, it's an act of kindness from her to the people; unfortunately, that's the wrong way of treating water meant for drinking. It's been some months since I started working towards opening a water factory, and I have come to understand that to get clean water worthy of human consumption, it takes long processes. Hopefully, I will explain this in detail by the time I start producing mine. Imagine drinking water from the ground just by pouring chemicals without filtering the particles at least or even boiling.
Indeed, water is life, and for basically everything we do in life, water will always be needed, but when it comes to drinking water, it is important to be intentional about the source for the sake of our well-being, as water easily gets polluted. Clean water is hard to come by in our world today. Here in Nigeria, there are numerous water factories producing drinking water, either in satchets as shown above or bottled water, which is considered so pure but quite expensive. Unfortunately, there are lots of adulterations, people taking a known brand name to fill up the bottles with untreated water just to sell. It's hard to even trust our bottle water nowadays. Before now, my family's source of drinking water was bottled water only. Nestle Water, for example, is a brand we have examined and believed that their water is pure but expensive; however, we kept buying it at least to reduce hospital trips coming from illness from bad water. But the whole narrative changed when the cost skyrocketed and we began to spend a huge amount of money capable of feeding us for a month only on water. We resorted to satchet water again. Even though many water factories I know and have visited don't observe hygiene or get their water treated according to NAFDAC specifications, there are still a few factories whose people's health is one of their major priorities, and those are the factories I patronize through their drivers. You can see the lengths I go to be sure of my source of drinking water.
We have to be deliberate about the water we drink to avoid the unnecessary illnesses that come with consuming bad water. Even in our different homes, most of us have overhead tanks used for storing water after pumping. How often do we wash them and be sure that they're clean enough? This is also something we should consider for anyone for whom healthy living is a priority.
As it stands now, satchet water is my major source of drinking water, and while I still boil them sometimes and have them filled with empty bottled water and refrigerate them, sometimes I drink them without boiling since I buy from companies that are fair enough with their water treatment.
If you don't have access to buying treated water for drinking, I suggest filtration and boiling the water available for you to reach up to 100 degrees Celsius prior to drinking it.
Consumption of unclean water can easily affect our well-being and make our health vulnerable to diarrhea and other illnesses. So to live a healthy life, one has to always drink clean water.
Image 2 and 3 are mine; image one was taken from Canva.
This is my entry to the #HiveLearners community contest on the topic titled, What are you drinking?