Village Fountains

One of the worries I have about privatization is that they will stop people from having enough water to drink, water for the thirsty. All across Spain, walking the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, the piligrimage is made possible, and reinforced, and helped by the village fountains. One stops at each, fills the water bottle, rests, drinks and thinks about the gift of water, and how for centuries, each pilgrim has come here with the same needs. The water comes cold and clean from the ground, up into the village fountains, which are a centering place for the community. Even though most homes now have running water, it is a meeting place in the long afternoons, and evenings.
I was reading a poem by Elizabeth Bishop about Brazil, and a boarded-up fountain, whose three-headed mouthpiece is now in a museum, and the spout just opens into the air, and splashes down into the basin, and all the poor women come with their plastic bottles to fill up here. One hopes that the pipe has not become contaminated, and that the groundwater has not become contaminated. We have seen dysentery in these communities, without bathrooms and indoor plumbing, where the dogs and pigs and chickens are running down the streets in the rivulets of human excrement; and the little kids are playing kickball and running through the area in oblivion to the public health menace that it is.
WILPF is worried about the rights of communities to their own water supply. Here in California, water is a subtext for every battle of ownership and legal expense for farmers and city folk alike. We don't have enough. When I went to Louisiana, I was amazed, and almost brought to a feeling of deep-boned greed, for that much water. Water drowning the country, so that only the tallest trees stood out. If only we could have some of it!
WILPF has started helping people amass the literature and legal briefs to help themselves get the rights to local water supplies. This is tremendously important in Central America. Here in Santa Cruz county a German company had bought the local water supply, and it was expensive to buy it back, and it was a BIG lesson in getting the community involved.
The fact that Sarah Palin is riding on her giving everyone in Alaska a piece of the oil earnings is very interesting. She is getting credit for work someone else did. I wonder who wrote the law that gave every citizen a part of the earnings from natural resources. God bless whoever it was. Maybe THAT law is the law we should be looking at to use as a model for the water rights.
Next, I hope that communities will start planting fruit and vegetables alongside freeways, and in public schoolyards, and in every place that useless ornamental plants are now being used for landscaping. Maybe if people started seeing FOOD instead of useless plants, we would start to share with the community the impetus to eat healthier, and eat locally produced food. And once the food was growing, people might start to organize to help harvest it, and produce local jams, canned goods, and dried fruits. We could learn to be more communitarian and healthy members of society. I think Wendell Berry is right about connecting to the earth. We need to be "grounded" in order to be healthy. When the world is full of orchards, we will also have bicycle paths, and walking paths, and "commons" and "heaths" again. Towns will be built around the human scale for walking to the store and back.
I hope to walk the Camino to Santiago some day. I want the feel of walking 500 miles across Spain, on a thousand-year-old path, through villages which have kept their character and their ways of being organized around the village fountain for all these years. I believe in solar cooking and "green" architecture, but the next step is protecting the water supply, and integrating local farming into our towns.