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Coincidently,  I came across the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development tonight... ties in great with my post below. Click on the banner to check it out. Don't forget to put in your vote!

Just add water.

Saba definitely has its own unique living experiences. Some of my friends deal with flying cockroaches and some of them with small gecko lizards in their clothes' drawer (happened to a close friend... put on PJ pants without knowing, sat down and felt something crawling on her leg. I think you can imagine the rest of the story). I am having to learn how to live without water for days at a time. The water system on Saba is based on electrical pumps, and mine has a tendency of breaking ( + the 'nearby' construction is affecting the cistern under our house).

(...and by 'nearby' I mean right outside my front door.)

I am a pretty easy going person. When I volunteered in Honduras for 3 months we took bucket showers every day and lived with the bare essentials - it was completely doable, and makes you appreciate the things you have at home a little more. I think having that experience in Honduras is really helping me cope with the water situation here; especially because it happens more than once a semester. When you combine a stressed out, hard working medical student who looks forward to going home to shower to feel refreshed after a 12hour day of studying in the caribbean SUMMER (it's 30+ degrees here everyday) with the lack of water  =   :(

It happened again this weekend. And as I was sitting in my living room/dining/kitchen area and surfing the web as a study break, one of the sites I check regulary is MSF. There it was, front headline: a story about the hardships of fleeing, finding food, getting health care and seeking shelter in the Eastern DRC...

© Emily Lynch/MSF

"I left my village with my family at the beginning of the fighting. On Wednesday, having no food, I returned with some friends to my field to harvest vegetables. We heard weapons fire, and during the shooting  a bullet lodged in my left arm. I returned with my friends who were not wounded to the village where they made a stretcher out of branches to carry me to the main road where we then able to find a motorcycle to the next town. We waited until the next day to come to the hospital because we did not want to travel at night."

- Man (28) with 3 children, North Kivu, May 2012 

read the rest of the story here.

... and there I was complaining about lack of water. It's funny how everything was put into perspective. We take water for granted and forget it is a bare necessity. 

When I came home from my volunteer work in Honduras I had a hard time adjusting back into the 'modern' society I was previously accustomed to; I became more aware/ careful of everything around me. 

Not sure where I wanted to go with this post... but I guess it is about raising awareness. Stop and think. It's unbelievable that such simple hardships still exist in 2012 - even on an island like Saba.