Culligan Water

  

Here is a bottle of drinking water. It costs 25 gourdes or 65 cents U.S., per five-gallon bottle.  Some people call it "ionized water" and it usually goes by the brand name Culligan.

  When I hear the word Culligan I think water softeners, but here it means water purifiers. Most of the people who live here are used to the local water, and I am guessing many drink it from the tap. There are at the same time dozens of these businesses; every other block you see a little storefront or tiny building offering purified water.

   SNEP, le Système National d'Eau Potable, has been busy in St.-Marc both laying new water lines here in the town and hooking up to new wells and springs in the mountains to the east of us.  I saw some of their aqueducts the Sunday I went out to the little chapels. It was very pretty up there in the mountains, and  there seemed to be a lot of activity- recreation, clothes-washing, etc.- in the vicinity of these waterways. So we hope a little chlorine gets added between there and here!

 Back to my Culligan water. I think the water is distilled.  Claire, a Belgian lady who is working with the engineers to modernize the town water system, calls the bottled water "dead water," because all the minerals have been removed by the process, in addition to the bacteria.  The thing that gets me about the bottled water, though, is that I think they just take your used bottle, refill it, and hand it back to you.  I don't know this for sure, as I have only looked in the door of the water stores and checked out the big distilling tank.  Meritesse always goes for me and hauls home the new bottles, and, while they are always capped with a new plastic seal, they seem suspiciously dusty to me.  I don't think I want to know.

  When I first heard the price, I remember thinking, how on earth can they sterilize a 5-gallon bottle, assure sanitary conditions in the distilling room, fill it and cap it and give it back to you for 65 cents?! Jeff, my science advisor, put my mind at ease with his comment on the system:  "Oh, Liz! I'm sure the Haitian department of health and sanitation is all over that!"  So with that cheerful thought I've been drinking plenty of it, and so far so good.