Water is Life
If there were one place on the planet impervious to the ravages of the pandemic, you might have guessed it would be the Navajo Nation. Viewed from a distance, it seems impregnable, a remote, self-contained country spread across three U.S. states — Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah — and encompassing more than 27,000 square miles, its ancient boundaries marked by four sacred mountains: Dibé Ntsaa (Hesperus Mountain) on the north, Tsoodził (Mount Taylor) on the south, Sisnaajiní (Blanca Peak) on the east, and Dook'o'oosłiid (San Francisco Peaks) on the west.
As it turns out, you would have guessed wrong. Terribly wrong. The first cases of COVID-19 in Navajo Nation were diagnosed in March 2020, the outbreak spread by a church gathering in a small town in northeastern Arizona. Two months later, there had been 100 pandemic deaths in Navajo Nation, which reported a higher per capita infection rate than any of the 50 U.S. states. As of mid-May 2022, more than 53,000 COVID cases had been confirmed there — that’s a 32 percent infection rate — and 1,770 deaths; with a population of about 165,000, there has been one death for every 93 people living in the Nation.
“That’s a huge percentage of our population,” laments Emma Robbins, who grew up not far from the Grand Canyon. “It hit all of us hard on the reservation. We lost so many Elders, and so we’ve lost libraries of wisdom, language, tradition. That’s something we’ll never get back. It’s not just a loss of life; it’s a loss of our culture. It highlighted what has always existed: We don’t have the same things that other Americans do.”
Those disparities contributed directly to the tragic losses suffered by the Navajo during the pandemic. Many residents travel great distances to find a grocery store or a place to buy other necessities, and they would return to the reservation, bringing the infection with them. And with several generations of a family often sharing one small home, and a third of households living below the federal poverty level, Navajo Nation became a fertile breeding ground for COVID-19.
Furthermore, in the months before a vaccine became available, the Navajo Nation lacked ready access to what was recommended as a principal deterrent to the spread of the illness. “When COVID came, what’s the first thing they said?” asks Curt Ward. “‘Wash your hands.’ Well, when you don’t have running water, that’s tough to do.”
A member of the Rotary Club of Gilbert, Arizona, Ward is a relative newcomer to the Southwest. “I moved here from Iowa in 2014, and water poverty was a new thing to me,” he says. Even before the pandemic, Ward had begun reading about the water problems in the Navajo Nation, and he was shocked to learn that while the average American uses 80 to 100 gallons of water per day, the average Navajo uses only seven. “And in some cases,” Ward says, “it’s less than that.”
Robbins knows all about the shortage of water in the Nation, only she learned about it firsthand. She’d grown up in Tuba City — which she describes as “the largest community on the rez” — and her family had access to running water. But she remembers how, when she was a girl, her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins would travel to her family’s home to shower and fill containers with water before returning to their own waterless homes. And she blames her grandmother’s death from cancer on the scores of abandoned uranium mines that dot the Nation and pollute below-ground water sources.
Ward lives in a suburb of Phoenix, about 200 miles south of Tuba City, but he and, as it turned out, other Rotarians were eager to do what they could to assist the Navajo in their quest for water. “People who think the Navajo wouldn’t know what to do with water if they had it are just dead wrong,” he says. “They value it; they worship it. They just don’t have any of it. We don’t need to teach the Navajo about water; we just need to help them get it.”
Rotary stood ready to do that, as did Robbins, who had left the reservation in her teens to attend college and begin her career as an artist. And, as ever, the Navajo people, the centuries-old caretakers of their homeland, were poised to proceed. Only one more thing was needed to complete the tetrad, that fourth point of the compass with which to map out the way to water.
[[break]]
“I have always been obsessed with water,” admits George McGraw. “My mom would take me to the zoo, she would turn around, and I would be stripped naked and running in the fountain by the entrance. You can’t keep me out of it.”
In 2009, McGraw graduated from Loyola University Chicago with a B.A. in philosophy, though the most significant thing he learned there lies outside that realm. “As a millennial from a middle-class background, I was privileged,” he explains. “I didn’t know that so many people didn’t have access to water. I was flabbergasted to find out about that in college and immediately wanted to do something about it.”
Two years after graduation, McGraw started an organization called DigDeep. Today, on its website, it’s described as “a human rights nonprofit working to ensure that every American has clean, running water” — but it didn’t exactly start out that way. DigDeep initially operated in Cameroon and South Sudan, where it built water systems in rural areas. Then, in 2013, DigDeep got a phone call from a woman who wanted to make a donation — only she insisted that the money be used in Navajo Nation; she had been volunteering there and saw homes built without kitchens or bathrooms because there wasn’t access to running water. In fact, as McGraw learned, 30 percent of the families in Navajo Nation were living without running water.
“That was definitely an aha moment for me,” McGraw says. “I hadn’t realized there were so many people in my own backyard without access. We hadn’t even thought about working in the U.S.” He would more fully comprehend the breadth of the problem as DigDeep and the U.S. Water Alliance prepared Closing the Water Access Gap in the United States: A National Action Plan, a 95-page report published in 2019. “We didn’t even know that the total number of people [in the U.S. without access to water and basic indoor plumbing] was 2.2 million until we did that study,” McGraw says.
DigDeep handed off its last international project to local partners in 2016 and has since concentrated its efforts in the United States, working in Appalachia and other parts of the country. But DigDeep’s greatest impact has come in the Southwest with its Navajo Water Project, which began in 2014 when the organization installed a water system for a Navajo family in Thoreau, New Mexico. Thoreau — pronounced thuh-ROO — is also home to the St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School, which provides opportunities for education, employment, and housing and offers a variety of social services that, among other things, make available clothing, food, and water to the people of the eastern portion of Navajo Nation. Among the mission’s employees is Darlene Arviso. Most days you can find her driving a big yellow tanker truck filled with 3,500 gallons of water, which she delivers to the Navajo homes scattered among the mesas in the desert outside Thoreau. Only half-jokingly, McGraw calls Arviso the real founder of DigDeep. Everyone else knows her as the Water Lady.
DigDeep worked closely with St. Bonaventure and Arviso, and it also cultivated close relationships with the residents of the Navajo Nation. “The entire Navajo Water Project is Indigenous-led from top to bottom,” says McGraw. “That really is everything. It’s the key to long-term sustainability for these projects. We’re building off-grid systems at people’s homes, and those systems will be owned by those homeowners and maintained and upgraded by them. Our projects last a long time only if people feel a sense of ownership and participation.
“But it’s also a way to right the wrong that caused the problem initially. These communities were left out of the decision making about water in the beginning. So first and foremost, engaging impacted communities around this work, giving them agency and power back, and letting them make these decisions is a way to right that wrong and to change that dynamic.”
[[break]]
DigDeep’s method is ingeniously simple. It begins with an explanatory visit by DigDeep project managers to the home of the family it’s assisting. The next morning, DigDeep delivers a 1,200-gallon cistern, which is then buried (so the water won’t freeze). Technicians plumb a sink, water heater, filter, and drain line; where families don’t have electricity, which is often the case, they install a solar panel, battery array, and electrical hookup to provide electricity to power the pump and lights. A tanker truck arrives and fills the cistern with clean water through an above-ground valve, and the homeowner receives training to operate, maintain, and repair the system, as well as a number to call should they encounter problems. All that unfolds over 24 hours.
The culminating moment occurs when everyone gathers around the sink, the faucet is turned on, and fresh water pours out, a moment often accompanied by the shedding of tears. “It can be really emotional,” explains Emma Robbins, who, after attending art school, living in Argentina, and running an art gallery in Chicago, returned to her people and now serves as the director of the Navajo Water Project. “The most impactful moment for me can be when there are Elders who have never had running water. It’s really beautiful, and, in an indirect way, when somebody gets running water, especially an Elder, it helps us continue to thrive as a people and a culture.”
In 2015, members of the Rotary Club of Gilbert attended a water conference in Phoenix, where they heard about DigDeep’s work in the Navajo Nation. They also learned that the installation of each home water system cost $4,500. Curt Ward explains what happened next: “Our members came back and said, ‘What do you think? Could we raise 4,500 bucks and sponsor one of these tanks?” The answer was a resounding yes — and things took off from there.
As the word spread, dozens of other Rotary clubs, from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and other countries, pitched in to support the Navajo Water Project, as did the philanthropic Rotary Foundation. “You wouldn’t believe how many people want to participate,” says Jim Bissonett of the Rotary E-Club of the Southwest and his district’s Rotary Foundation chair. “Once we got a little publicity, we got calls from around the country. There was so much enthusiasm.”
Ultimately, with Rotary grants totaling $222,000, DigDeep installed 51 home water systems near Thoreau, which meant more than 150 people Navajo had access to running water. Work had begun on the next phase of Rotary’s work with DigDeep—home water systems for about 80 Navajo families near Dilkon, New Mexico, backed by a $395,000 Rotary grant—when the pandemic struck and everything shut down.
Well, not everything. Due to strict quarantine restrictions, DigDeep could no longer interact directly with residents of the Navajo Nation, but it still had a job to do. “For the first 18 months of the pandemic, we had to pivot to emergency water work,” McGraw says. “We delivered more than a million gallons of water and set up temporary water access tanks at almost 1,500 homes.” About a fifth of those 275-gallon tanks were funded by members of Rotary.
“It was amazing how available these Rotary folks were,” says McGraw, “not getting lost in their own fear for themselves and their families, but asking, how can we help the people that are the most vulnerable. The thing that really stands out was the level of availability and communication at a time when it was tough to get in touch with anybody.”
And then Kenneth Chavez, a water technician for DigDeep, had another ingenious idea, a way for his team to get back to work despite the quarantine,. Chavez recalled a winter night he had spent on his land in Navajo Nation. He’d brought some bottled water, and when he awoke the next morning he remembered he’d left it outside in his car. He went to retrieve it, fully expecting to find it frozen, but when he opened the suitcase where he had packed it, he found the bottled water, nestled among his clothes, unfrozen.
Soon, DigDeep was employing a heated “suitcase” as a temporary adjunct to its home water system, an above-ground, outdoor unit connected to the underground cistern that allowed homeowners access to water without worrying that it would freeze. Now DigDeep, again with an assist from Rotary, was able to resume installation of the water systems without entering homes — and the systems could be easily upgraded to in-home systems when the impact of the pandemic diminished. That’s exactly what began to happen earlier this year, and Bissonett is hopeful that the latest phase of Rotary’s involvement in the Navajo Water Project can be completed by spring 2023.
As for Curt Ward, he remains as committed to working with the Navajo as when he first learned about water poverty in the Southwest. “You can’t walk away from it,” he insists. And DigDeep’s Emma Robbins, who has worked closely with Ward, looks forward to continuing her partnership with him and with Rotary. “I love it when Navajos are doing work for Navajos,” she says, “but it’s also important for us to have strong allies and advocates. And that’s what Rotary has been for us.”
