Tomorrow there should be water.

“Tomorrow there should be water”.   The Alcalde’s promise rings out in a hollow sort of a way. Since February we’ve been waiting.  San Juan Chamelco isn’t a big town. It’s 10,000 people clustered right at the edge of the mountains.  It’s the heart of the Q’eqchi’ region in Guatemala and has been dubbed “Garden of the Verapaces” because of the thick cloud forest filled with orchids that seemed to stretch on forever.

It’s really only been four days since the water just stopped completely.  But over the last three months we’ve stayed up later and later and later every night.  Waiting first for a flow, until that turned into a trickle, to start so that we could fill up buckets to cook and bathe and clean during the following day. The Chipi-Chipi rain--a constant drizzle that is the hallmark of the Alta Verapaz--hasn’t come this year.  Or last year.  Or the year before.  The sweaters, thick blankets and heavy rubber mud boots that define life in this chunk of Guatemala are gone. Replaced by flip flops, sunburns and t-shirts bought for 5 quetzales from a paca.

The heavy thunderstorms that signalled the end of the short dry season (March/April) haven’t come this year.  But neither did the rain last year. The orchids aren’t blooming and the corn ears are small, hard and dry.  Without the rain in May the baby corn plants, popping their heads up after an April planting are wilting and struggling. Riding the bus into Coban is to sit on a bus full of women and girls with their brightly coloured plastic water tinakas.  With toddlers in tow they are off to visit friends, relatives, acquaintances.  Anyone they know in Coban who has water. Walking down the streets, with containers balanced on their heads or hips, it’s like the town has somehow skipped back in time a decade or three.

“We’ll send a truck.” Says the alcalde.  A water truck, that will drive up and down the streets and fill a few buckets for each house. A reason to stay home from work and give up a day's wage--just to have water. My host family assures me that while the truck was helpful last year, it’s still not the same as having water. Or being able to wash our clothes or clean our hair. Their oldest daughter and an aunt haven’t had water all week.  The frustration is palpable when people talk about last May. It got so bad that they risked protesting. Something that the community elders still remember being dangerous, as protestors they knew in the 1970s and 1980s disappeared.  There was a petition and they marched to the municipality office. They waited in the park to talk to the alcalde. They were met with police, the military, paid counter protesters.

There was no water.  Not that week. Or the next.

And May is just beginning.

Large swaths of Guatemala have been fighting through one of the worst droughts in recent history over the last three years.  The European Commision on Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection estimates 1.3 million people are being severely impacted and over half a million are facing direct food insecurity because the rain just won’t come.  Oxfam is handing out cash to over 2,000 severely affected families and assessing what can be done to alleviate the heavy impact that drought has on health conditions. Families without water lose what little access to good sanitation they once had. Parasites that cause diarrhea, nausea and vomiting hit families facing food insecurity particularly hard, impounding malnutrition and leaving them more vulnerable than ever to diseases such as zika, malaria and dengue fever.

Bouncing out past Chamelco in the back of a pickup towards the aldea of Chamil, the effects of climate devastation surround us; from the thick haze as massive corporate farmers burn sugarcane to harvest it (easier and cheaper than other methods) filling the air across the highlands with a smog that lasts for months, to the newly barren hillsides as deforestation runs rampant throughout the Alta Verapaz. Landslides, both small and frighteningly large, creep onto roads from Chicaman to Cahabon.  Dry loose soil, no longer protected by a canopy of root and forest, sliding off the hillsides.  Particularly when it rains. Dust coats leaves and flowers. Plastic bags and bottles float down streams, catching on twigs and branches.  Bobbing in the eternally brown water that is slowly washing away the topsoil.