There Is No Them.

There's only us.

This installment was written by my husband, Mark.

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U2 is one of my favorite bands. They have a great song called “Invisible” that ends with the repeated lyrics “There is no them, there is no them, there’s only us.”

It reminds me of water problems.

Who are ‘they’?

If you live in a fully developed nation, you’ve probably found yourself asking questions like “when are they going to resurface this road?” or “when are they going to restore our internet service?” or “when are they going to fix the streetlight?” You most likely take for granted that there is a “they” out there somewhere that will take care of these problems. In the developing world, there oftentimes is no “they” or “them”.

There’s only us.

The road to our hotel, for example, was a public road, but there was no “they” to maintain it. Instead, there was only us, the landowners along the road, who formed a voluntary association to raise money and organize road maintenance. This worked pretty well, and the road was generally in good shape even though it was shockingly steep and bumpy by first-world standards.

The same thing was true for our water supply system. Except the water system was a daily train wreck and the cause of many sleepless nights. Allow me to relate this recurring nightmare.

A little background… Many years before the hotel was built, some locals found a large spring of agua dulce (potable water) high in the mountains nearby. They ran a makeshift piping system under the dirt roads from the spring to the small community of homes on the mountain closer to the coast. Over time, this community grew to include many more homes and several hotels – like ours. But there was no water utility involved. There was no they.

Technically, this was considered a non-legal water source because the community did not have a concession issued by the government. However, Costa Rica legal precedent protected the rights of water users who had grandfathered sources of water like ours. So, our water source wasn’t completely legal, but no one could deny us from using it either. Crazy as it sounds, this is actually fairly common in Costa Rica.

So, what’s the problem?? The problem is that this system was not designed and built by professionals. It was a cheap, homemade, gravity-driven system made with PVC plastic pipes buried a few inches under the dirt road. And parts of the system were routed through the jungle where the pipes weren’t even buried.

Every time there was a small earthquake (common in Costa Rica), or landslide (also common), or a heavy truck drove down the dirt road, or a tree fell on the pipe, or a thirsty hunter in the jungle decided he needed a drink of water, the pipe would be broken. Hmmm…I wonder when they are going to fix that pipe? Answer: Never! There is no they!

Since our hotel was located higher up the mountain than the other users in the community, and we had a full-time maintenance staff paying attention to these things, we were usually the first ones to notice that “no water was coming down from the mountain”.

I must have heard that phrase a hundred times from our maintenance guys!

Oh no…

When that happened, our community “water association” was theoretically supposed to fix it, but the guy the association relied on to do the work never seemed to be available. We will call him Miguel.

Instead, whenever water stopped flowing down the mountain, we would dispatch our hotel maintenance crew to go up and fix it ourselves. This normally required anywhere from a half-day to a full day of work, meaning that our guys had to neglect the hotel’s maintenance needs on those days. Most of the time, our crew fixed the break before the other users in the community even knew there was a problem.

You might be wondering how we met the hotel’s water needs when no water was coming down the mountain. Well fortunately, we had several large tanks on-site that could store several days of water use. So long as we quickly noticed that no water was flowing into our storage tanks, we could get the breakage fixed before the tanks were depleted.

We didn’t realize how important this was in our first couple of years owning the hotel. Occupancy was pretty low, so we weren’t using much water. However, as our business picked up and our water use grew, this became critical. We learned this through several extremely close calls, and I started getting super stressed about it. As a luxury boutique hotel with a high-end restaurant, running out of water isn’t an option.

Once I woke up in the middle of the night with a strange certainty that we were out of water. I went to our bathroom faucet to check and sure enough…nothing! I don’t know how I knew. Our night-time security guard and I scrambled through the darkness and found that no water was coming down the mountain AND we had an internal leak that had drained two of our three storage tanks. We limped along on the last tank until our crew could fix the problems the next day.

During the dry season, the amount of water coming down the mountain tapered off even when there were no breaks. Conversely, the community’s water use peaked during dry season as gardens required sprinkling, pools needed topping off, and the hotels filled up with water-using guests. The old homemade water supply system could barely keep up even when there were no breaks in the lines. In the dry months, everyone in the community became frustrated over the lack of water and sometimes the finger-pointing would begin.

Sometimes, the fingers were pointed at us.

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

There was a valve buried in the road near our hotel that could shut off the flow of water to all the users further down the road from us. With nowhere else to go, that meant that all the water would flow into our tanks if the valve was closed.

During one especially dry period, I received several angry emails and phone calls from community members down the mountain accusing us of closing the valve. They hadn’t received any water in days, so they were understandably upset. We grew tired of the accusations though and eventually asked Miguel (the association’s maintenance guy) to break the handle off the valve so it would be stuck in the open position.

Over time, we learned to manage our storage tanks and water use so that we rarely had a problem. Our maintenance guys were trained to check our tanks three times each day. We automated and improved our internal water systems and even discovered that our main water supply line was partially crushed. For almost five years, our water supply had been constricted by this crushed supply line! Eventually, Marlo and I started sleeping well again and stopped wondering when “they” were going to improve the community water system.

For the most part, our neighbors appreciated the work we did to help keep the system running, and many of them also pitched in to help make repairs when needed. Two neighbors in particular, a semi-retired chiropractor from Texas, and one of the many people named ‘Mark’ on our road were among the first ones to always step up. We were almost all expats from the USA or Canada, and most of us had learned that there is no them.

There’s only us.

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