Before you start jumping around, come and fetch water….

So its 7.00 am Saturday morning and NEPA graciously welcomed me back by taking the light and not bringing it back. So the coal city had been draped in total darkness for the last 10 hours till daylight allowed us appreciate our surroundings again. I can see that it’s a bit too late for Okpara square, it has now turned into the bootcamp workout area for all Enugu people and visitors alike. My mum thinks however that it is where people go to hook up.  She says if they ate less they wouldn’t have to go jumping around outside looking for someone to chase them around.

Anyways I am still mentally sorting my dvds to decide what workout I wanted to do when I realized that the water drum in the hallway was almost empty. Like the good daughter I am trying to be, I asked my mum if I should fill up the drum for her and she said no because the young woman that comes to fetch water for her would be there on Monday. So I walked off to go put on my gym clothes. On second thought being that my mum sat chatting with me the day before as I did my workout and she couldn’t really understand for the Love of God why I would be wasting so much energy for nothing she called out “before you start jumping around come and fetch water for me, It’s also exercise.”

I had to laugh because living in Nigeria there are so many household chores that required physical labor, so that going to the gym was totally unnecessary if you did most of the chores yourself. I don’t know if I hated fetching water but I definitely preferred it better than being the one to make moi moi for Sunday breakfast. The whole process was exhausting even if the outcome was delicious.

So back to fetching water, I would say that 90% of the Nigerians my age that grew up in Nigeria had their fair share of this exercise. It can range from being a mild pass time to being a vigorous whole body workout if you had to fill drums in the third floor or above. You literally trained used the major muscles, no need for a personal trainer. So let me explain why and how this wonderful sports came to be, generally speaking if you had faucets in a house if you turned one on water should come out of it… well in some cases it does in most cases it doesn’t.  Which results in people trying to find alternative ways to provide themselves with water needed for cooking, washing, drinking and flushing the toilet.

Water was supposed to be provided by the local government but it  isn’t as regular as required. If you could afford to build your own home tanks and containers it became a major part of all housing projects. It is a large part of what most plastic manufactures produce because it’s needed on a daily basis.  So every now and again when the taps run you would take the water hose fill all tanks and containers so that you have water for the drier period. If you had a water pump you might be able to save yourself from a regular total body workout but why do that when you can stay fit fetching water.

Otherwise if you couldn’t afford the tanks and the compound you lived in didn’t have a functioning communal tap, you would either have to go to the neighbors or to the neighborhood stream to fetch water. In severe cases you may have to drive somewhere or walk quite a distance to get gallons of drinking water.

So Saturdays was a day of doing all the house chores fetching water included, depending on how fit you were you had several options in which you could cut short your workout by using two 50, 20 or 15 liter gallons to fetch the water or buckets which meant you were going more for a cardio workout than strength training as you would to go repeatedly to complete the task with smaller containers.

Since I had been told by my doctors not to carry heavy stuff I opted for the buckets I don’t remember but I believe it took me about 8 to 10 times to get the job done and one important key factor not to forget is locking the water tank. Why is it so important you may ask? If you live in a shared compound your neighbors may feel at liberty to use your water whilst forgetting to ask for your permission especially in periods of scarcity. In any case going to a public tap if you lived in a story building as we call it used to be a good social pass time. So you would stand on the line waiting for your turn and you gossip about the neighbors, eye the boy next door or hiss at that silly girl that thinks she is better than you.

Thinking back now I believe we should make fetching water an official sport because we would be very good at it. I remember little girls playing oga whilst balancing buckets on their heads; we would be exceedingly good at it. In boarding school I used to go up hill from the stream with two buckets of water only to come to the top and a senior student would take it from me. I believe it’s where I got my endurance from because you to go again until the water you fetched was actually yours J In some ways it’s definitely more exciting than jumping up and down in front of a TV