The Dripping Stopped

Rain yesterday. The first in weeks.

Down in the town they shut the water off to the households. The hospital's water came in tanker trucks. Farms with their own wells watched the level sink — some near dry.

Up here on the mountainside, the trough stopped dripping two weeks ago.

A hollowed trunk, fed by a spring above it. It watered the farm animals for generations. In the summers since the camps began, it is where children wash the mud from their boots after a hike — where water gets played with, tested, spilled.

Now the spring no longer reaches it. The wells and springs that carry this place through summer are dangerously low. Water is down to the minimum — cooking, drinking, a shower at a trickle.

What is happening across most of Europe has arrived in the Carpathians.

Among the tasks — getting the camps ready, supporting the facilitators and the kids — my concern has been the work of the last weeks: walk the water. Find where the springs rise, which creeks still run, which have gone to a trickle, which have gone. At the creek, together with the kids from the summer camp, we built a small reservoir — to watch how it behaves over time. Rock and mud, moved by hand.

Now, with my host, the next piece: a series of reservoirs — cisterns — to hold what winter and spring send down. The melt, the torrential rains. Surplus water, held for the dry weeks, its quality kept.

Not only for this place. The surrounding farms have the same slopes and the same springs.

The rain came yesterday. One rain is not a spring.

Day 44–60 — Aufbau — Soil and Peace
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | Soil and Peace | CC BY-SA 4.0
stewardship@ubec.network