Water arrives by aqueduct and cannot be drunk without being boiled, electric power is rationed 2 or 3 times per week. The diesel plant of the outskirts goes out every day at 12 in the night, to avoid its reheat, and it lights up at 8 o'clock a.m. Water it is not properly treated, They only allow it to sit a little. It is pumped from the river until bigger moto-bombs and it arrives at each house through PVC tubes.
Guainieños have to leave the pipe in the surface of the streets, because it cannot be buried in floors of pure rock. They are seen there, like a temptation. In some of the neighborhoods they ended up stealing a mother tube and they left everybody without water.
The Inirida's floor is an extremist: It is sand or immense rocks, nothing else. It is not found a cobble or round rocks as in the rivers of the Valle del Cauca. That whole area of the amazonia rises on the Guyana Shield, a single enormous rock that goes from southern Venezuela, northwestern Brazil to the Amazon areas of Ecuador and Peru. In some streets the rock raises to the air amid the sand because otherwise it would be necessary to fly it with dynamite or to spend a lot of drill to reduce it. In the Indigenous Area, a near neighborhood to one of the brooks, the rocks appear amid the houses and until inside them. From one moment to another it is seen arising there, between the room and the kitchen, or in the rear end, as if it would be a wall. It makes part of the landscape and it breaks in to its domains.
When the airport was built, the rock was flew with dynamite and several indigenous old women noticed that since that time, they would come all the wickedness, that it was better to leave the rock as it was. And the rock was flew and by air arrived the politicians, the merchants, the miners, the prostitutes, our civilization, our half-modernity... Nowadays there is a quarry in route to the airport, and the floor is eaten away for building, like in Bogotá or Cali.
Garbage begins to accumulate toward the south, beyond the airport. Inírida, innocently, it has begun its basuroe22. Only some few indigenous families (they can be counted with the fingers of one hand) they are devoted to the recycling, in the same way as our indigent make it. Even this way, the normal thing is that all garbage produced by a family it is burned exactly in front of the house, when they full garbage drum. There is a truck paid by the Mayor's office, it pass by whenever it can and takes things to the basuro, but they are several neighborhoods that they don't know it.
Inírida sees rainwater running by its wide streets, in abundance in the rainy season. Only the main street and the roadway in front of the church are paved. Hardly seven blocks, between the governor's office and the port, have sewer system. There are other two small tracts with buried pipe, but they don't have any connection between theirselves, as if the town had been made by pieces. Most sees the residual waters pass in front of the house, how they travel to pleasure in its route to the river and they stagnate in plane places. Thanks to
, those that come out of the houses they are not black waters, but those of laundries and dishwashing. Many homes have septic well. People dig it among the holes that appear amid the rock, or they lift it in a little stand outside the house.
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The basuro is Cali's city dump, a dirty and ugly example of how not to dispose garbage.