Javier must rise early because his neighbor’s outdoor water faucet usually shuts off by 8 a.m. Before it stops, Julia Buendia Buatista shares with seven other families and then fills as many buckets as she can for herself – just in case.

Her water might not turn back on tomorrow, Javier says, articulating his family’s everyday fear.

Javier lives with his parents and seven siblings on the outskirts of Ayacucho. His earth-walled home, complete with electricity and television, sits too high on the 9,200-foot mountain to be connected to the city’s gravity-reliant water pipes.

Since they moved from their grandmother’s house in the city four years ago, Javier and his oldest brothers, Luis, William and Infanson, spend their time before school collecting the 25 gallons their family will need each day to drink, cook, wash dishes and faces, and feed the animals.

“It’s very hard because before we had enough water to drink and now we don’t,” says Javier’s mother Antonia Cardenas Calle. “In my mother’s house I didn’t worry about thinking about water. But here I think almost all day long.”

The steep elevation of the city is just one of the logistical barriers that prevents Javier’s family and Ayacucho’s 140,000 residents from having continual access to clean water. Even though the municipal water company says that 96 percent of the city’s population is connected to a fresh water pipe system, only the 700 people whose homes are directly connected to the treatment plant are provided with water all day. The rest find their faucets turn off regularly from lack of pressure and leaking along miles of aging and defective pipes.

Peru’s harsh climate compounds the problem. Little rain falls in Ayacucho from April through December, and by August, reservoirs and canals are in danger of drying up, says civil engineer Julio Salcedo Vargas, who helps create alternative water systems in the region with international humanitarian organization CARE.

“The hardest part is to get the water source, like springs or canals, because when there is no rainy season we don’t have enough water to get, not even in the canals,” he says. “The only water that comes to Ayacucho is from rain. There is not enough water here, because there is no rain.”

When the dry season prevents water from getting to homes, families like Javier’s have to visit the natural resources nearby. Sometimes they travel to a spring further up the mountain, Luis says, but when the spring is dry, they must take their buckets by taxi to the Huatatas River just east of town.

The taxi ride costs Javier’s family 10 neuvo sols, or about $3, nearly half of what Julia Buendia Buatista pays for her water access each month. The trip has been absolutely necessary three times this year, Javier says.

Aside from collecting extra water when he can, and conserving throughout the day, there is little Javier can do to help his family’s shortage in the long-term.

Inevitably, the problem will resurface tomorrow.

“I am used to it,” Javier says. “We get thirsty and without water we don’t have anything to drink.”

Thankfully, it has never reached that point.

It would be more difficult if they lived further from the river, he says.

Providing more than a drink

The waterline on a young girl’s skirt rises as she wades knee-deep in the cool Huatatas River. She nears the preacher and crosses her arms, preparing for the cleansing. Water rushes into her dark hair. Her head submerges. The river covers her eyes. The preacher pulls her up and out and it is done.

Fresh from the water, she is reborn.

A few hundred feet upstream from this weekend’s baptism, Javier, his brother William and their God-sister Karina splash and play in a more shallow section while they wait for their clothes to dry on the bank.

The children come every Sunday to do laundry and bathe but bring water from home for their afternoon stay.

Unless completely out at home “we don’t drink this water,” says 10-year-old William. “It’s contaminated.”

But that doesn’t stop the laundry – or the baptisms.

Hundreds of families journey from the city to the river each weekend to wash clothes, bathe or relax to the sound of rushing water. Even for those with water at home, the river has long been a source of life for Ayacucho.

Nearly a century ago, the water company, Entidad Prestadora de Servicios de Saneamiento Ayacucho S.A., or EPSASA, began working on a water system to treat and redirect the Huatatas River’s water to homes in the city, says EPSASA chemical engineer Zenobio Huamani Galindo.

While the river was a sufficient source for nearly 60 years, he says, by 1980 it could no longer support Ayacucho’s growing population.

“The water from Huatatas is good (when treated),” Galindo says. “The problem is that the amount of water is not enough.”

Today EPSASA draws from several water sources, ranging from the nearby Huatatas River to mountain rivers 50 to 100 kilometers (about 30 to 60 miles) away, he says. This water is routed through a system of reservoirs to the local treatment plant, where it is filtered and chlorinated before being dispersed across the city.

Mathematically, EPSASA engineers insist the plant produces enough to provide fresh water to Ayacucho all day, but the city’s aging pipes prevent effective distribution.

“We are producing 600 liters (158.5 gallons) per second with this amount of water,” Galindo says, explaining that even 450 liters (118.8 gallons) per second would be enough for continuous water.

Still, many in Ayacucho do not question their lack of water. This is all they have ever known.

“No water since three days ago,” says 19-year-old Vilma Rodriguez, shaking her head that she doesn’t know why it has stopped. “My parents already went to EPSASA to fill out more paperwork, but if we don’t have signatures for all the people on the block, they don’t believe there is a problem. It always happens.”

But EPSASA says they do know the city’s system is old and inefficient.

“We do as much as we can,” says EPSASA biochemical engineer Julio Hinostroza Molero. “Maybe some things are not within our reach.”

Reaching out to help

Javier’s family is not alone in their need for a reliable source of safe water.

Current statistics vary widely in both measurements and definitions of “water supply coverage,” but the United Nations World Health Organization reported that in 2000, only 77 percent of Peru’s population had potable, or safe, water to drink.

Even without the numbers, Ayacucho’s problem is clear.

The decline of Earth’s freshwater resources is one of the most pressing issues facing developing nations like Peru today, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

Recently, the Peruvian government committed to improving its overall water quality and distribution system. In September 2002, President Alejandro Toledo signed a $50 million loan with the World Bank to expand fresh water and sanitation service in Peru’s most rural areas.

Much of the money for Peru’s potable water development comes from similar international loans and aid projects, says EPSASA engineer Galindo.

This year EPSASA began a jointly funded venture with German Development Bank KfW to establish better rain-collecting reservoirs, in hopes that the water company will be able to store more water from the rainy season. Also, the bank is funding the replacement of Ayacucho’s underground pipes, a step that EPSASA engineers say could drastically improve the effectiveness of their current system.

CARE has worked in Ayacucho for three years, establishing alternative clean water systems in 106 neighboring communities for 3,600 families.

Many of the families that receive CARE’s services have water access that Javier’s family can only dream about – clean water, all day, every day.

Nilo Guzman Castro, a father of four, has seen an improvement in his children’s health since CARE installed a water system in his town, Pompay, two years ago.

Now when his 5-year-old daughter returns from school, she drinks directly from their backyard faucet without hesitation.

She hasn’t been sick for two years, Castro says, adding that he worries about the children who are not as fortunate as his own.

“I feel afraid for them, the people who don’t have water at home. But maybe one day, they will have water all day,” he said. “They can’t worry about it, because they don’t have much money. They can’t afford to have clean water.”

The cycle begins again

It is nearly 6 a.m. when Javier grimaces and rests the last of his 42-pound buckets outside the kitchen door. His mother will be awake soon to boil water for the children’s breakfast and cover the buckets designated for sanitary drinking and cooking.

Before settling down on the bench in his room to finish his homework, Javier checks that his many animals – turkeys, chickens, goats, dogs, a kitten and a parrot – also have clean water.

At last, with time for himself, he opens his notebook to the diagram they discussed in science class yesterday: Water originates in the ocean, evaporates into the atmosphere, falls back to the Earth’s surface through precipitation and flows to the oceans, where the cycle begins again.

Javier opens to a fresh page and writes, “I think if there is no water on the planet there is no life…”