“PUR”

At one of our meetings back in Appleton, what felt like a thousand years before, Dave had shown us this little packet of chemicals the size of a teabag. It was this wonderful invention of Proctor and Gamble and was called PUR. The directions called for dumping one packet into a couple gallons of water, stirring vigorously for a period of time, and then letting it settle for another period of time. In the bottom of the container of water all the dirt and particles clump together in a gelatinous mass and the rest of the water is pure and crystal-clear.

The best description of the water from the river next to where we were camped in Mosiro was to say it was diluted mud. I can’t recall ever seeing running water anywhere in the US that was quite this dirty and dank.

When the first bucket of it was brought up from the river, everyone looked at Dave as if to say, “let’s see you make this stuff clean.”

It took several packets of PUR to get each bucket of water, but with lots of stirring and careful discarding of the waste, the water did begin to sparkle. The first day there, the males in our group along with the Maasai made 55 gallons of clean water. It sounds weird, but what else do you call it?