“I don’t know how and when this will happen, but all I need is water, I don’t want anything else”, says Anya, a former social worker in her 70s as we walk together on the muddy streets of Văldinești village (pseudonym) on a rainy November morning. Just like most villagers in her neighbourhood, she does not have sufficient access to water to meet her consumption and household needs since groundwater levels in the area are limited and a centralized system of water provisioning from the state is absent. It is hard to conceive of a resource more omnipresent and significant than water: it surrounds us in the outer world, as a large proportion of our planet consists of bodies of water, but it is also a fundamental part of our inner world, composing, not just sustaining, human and nonhuman bodies. Beyond its importance as a physical substance, water is also embedded in material and immaterial landscapes. As it flows across a plurality of economic, technological, political and spiritual fields, it also plays a significant role in sustaining and fostering social life (Wagner, 2013). 

Văldinești, my main fieldwork site from October 2022 to December 2023, is a village of approximately 1000 inhabitants located in the north of the Republic of Moldova. The main street that crosses the village connects Văldinești with the national road, while also dividing the community in two hydraulic worlds. In the western part of the village, most households are connected to the regional network of water pipes, a system managed by the municipal company founded in 2012 by the local council of the village hall. The water is extracted from underground springs using mainly repurposed infrastructural artifacts located on the territory of Soviet agricultural cooperatives, offering drinking water to approximately one half of the village. In contrast, the eastern side lacks both the former Soviet infrastructure and the connection to the regional system of aqueducts, and as such, getting access to drinking water is a pressing concern of the everyday. 

In this context, locals rely on private and communal wells, grappling with limited water availability and varying water quality. In 2017, an attempt to bring piped water to the eastern neighborhoods was made, when the village hall obtained state funds to build an artesian well, a water tower and a pipe network that would make water flow through the taps of every household. Even though the construction of these was mostly finalized, due to a technical error in the project’s plan that didn’t account for the supply of electricity, water never flowed through pipes and taps. In one of my conversations with the village mayor, I learnt that the updated version of the project proposal is due for approval with the Agency of Verification and Expertisation—a state entity that authorizes the construction of public projects—for the past four years. This iteration of the proposal addresses the issues in the initial plan and requests additional funds for finalizing the works, but it soon became clear that neither the village administration nor the officials in Chișinău have any clarity on when the final stages of the construction will be resumed and water will, at last, flow for every household in the eastern neighborhood of Văldinești. In this article, I investigate the ways in which water insecurity is experienced in the everyday life of this post-Soviet rural community. From creative tinkering that helps villagers secure water for their daily needs to submitting demands to the local administration which is expected to deliver centralized access to water, they navigate an uncertain terrain of in-betwenness. On the one hand, the last decades did not bring much change in the ways locals obtain water, while on the other hand, the promise of universal water access for all villagers brought along by the not-yet-complete infrastructural project traps them in a state of waithood and hope for a longer-term solution. 

The poetics of making-do:

In the eastern part of the village, centralised access to water was never the norm, but advancements in the construction of the water project fostered the collective imagination of a more secure water future. Lacking clarity both on the reasons for the suspension of construction works and on the completion timeline, that prospect appears to be a distant dream for the residents in this neighbourhood. In the meantime, they resort to a vast array of practices in search of solutions, albeit short-term ones, to the reduced availability of water. Most villagers rely on wells shared among several households or, more frequently, privately constructed near the house to serve a single household. A bricolage that is widely employed is the installation of small submersible water pumps inside the wells—a mechanism which extracts underground water and directs it through hoses, pipes and taps. This water is used for drinking and other daily and seasonal needs such as watering the garden, or more recently, as water supply for washing machines and dishwashers. Although creative, these arrangements are usually temporary because the water sediment and sand in the wells clog the pumps, requiring them to be replaced on a yearly basis. More so, water levels in wells are not constant, and as I learned from my conversations with the villagers, a few loads of laundry over the weekend might leave some without water for the whole following week, until the water is replenished in the well. Such interventions are also inaccessible to many, not only because groundwater availability varies greatly according to the geographical location of the house but also because they call for considerable financial costs for the installation and continuous maintenance of the pumps.

Anya offers one such illustrative example. When she and her late husband moved into their house on the outskirts of the village, she was counting on the water from the communal well of the neighbourhood. A few years later, that well became depleted, so she resorted to using the well in her downhill neighbour’s yard. Having advanced in age, she is currently unfit to carry buckets of water uphill, so that option is no longer viable. Anya never attempted to dig a private well in her yard like some of her neighbors, because the limited groundwater availability in the area would render it “a mere waste of money”. Instead, she collects rainwater in open barrels and uses it for cleaning and feeding her chickens and rabbits, while the potable water brought by her son, Alex, is used for her own consumption needs. Alex lives in Chișinău and comes once a month to bring Anya 20 five-litre bottles of potable water. She rations it out, ensuring she has enough for cooking and drinking until his next visit. Anya dreads winters because freezing temperatures and the uneven roads in the village make it impossible for her son to drive to her house and deliver the monthly water supply. In such instances, she hires an acquaintance from the village who brings her a few water bottles on foot until the roads become drivable once again.

My interest in the topic started as an inquiry into the manifestations of water infrastructure in rural Moldova. As my exploration progressed through close encounters in the field, I distanced myself from understanding infrastructures as reduced to technological and material artifacts. Instead, hoping to highlight infrastructures as variegated landscapes, I follow Baviskar (2007) in conceptualizing the multiplicity of anchors that make up the water system of the village through the notion of waterscape. This approach illustrates that infrastructures are composed as much by the process of building physical objects –pipes, (artesian) wells, water towers—as they are by the labour of those concerned with them. This labour is not just about assembling and maintaining infrastructural artefacts, but also about the work of “creating, sustaining and altering relations between people, things and places” (Baviskar, 2007, p.4). In Văldinești, the hybrid arrangements that make up the waterscape give rise to a multiplicity of socio-technical bricolages. Paying attention to such practical tinkering highlights the agencies that would go unacknowledged otherwise: besides material artifacts and institutions, subjects play a central role in mediating and securing access to water, and through their activities, the objects they use and the spaces they occupy, villagers themselves become part of the infrastructure (Simone, 2004). Without romanticizing them nor replacing the need for systemic interventions from local authorities, such responses to the problem of water insecurity offer short-term solutions that highlight locals’ capacity to endure and adapt. 

Infrastructural suspension

In 2019, the construction of the water project in Văldinești was mostly completed, but without the necessary connection to electricity, the locals never got to access the water they hoped for. After one of my visits, as Anya walks me to the main road, she points to the water tower and the newly built artesian well, only 30 meters from her house. We walk towards the area for her to show me where she thinks the fault lies—the broken wires in between two poles that would connect the pump to electricity. Anya is convinced that if only those wires would be fixed, the water would start flowing: “If I could, I would climb up there and connect them myself”. Tearing up, she reminisces about her late husband and regrets that he passed away without ever seeing the water reach the pipes in front of their house: “I hope that at least I don’t have to die until I get tap water”. In circumstances of protracted uncertainty, Anya and other villagers alike are compelled to wait for water—from the sky, from other members of the community and hopefully, from the state, should the water project ever be brought to completion. 

Infrastructures are developed as long-term investments and can reveal a great deal about aspirations, promises and imaginations of the future. But just like the water project in Văldinești, infrastructural initiatives seldomly follow linear temporalities that start with the planning phase and end with inauguration ceremonies. Until the future they promise materializes, the present is suspended in uncertainty as the locals anticipate and hope for the completion of the project. Rejecting such linearity, Gupta (2018) argues that rather than treating infrastructures as ‘things’ with a clear telos, they should be perceived as open-ended processes: as the construction advances, is modified, or discontinued all together, the future becomes unknown and unknowable. The material artefacts surrounding the construction site—the rubble, concrete panels, rusty pipes and new pipes, just as much as the water tower and the artesian well which are considered ready to be put in use—operate as what the author calls ‘ruins of the future’. For Gupta (2018), such “ruination is not about the fall from past glory but this property of in-between-ness, between the hopes of modernity and progress embodied in the start of construction and the suspension of those hopes in the half-built structure” (p.70). In between what was promised and what will actually be delivered, the villagers navigate the terrain of anticipation of a future that might or might not come.  

In this state of suspension and with limited options available to them, it might be easy to dismiss locals’ capacity to act as they wait for the water to flow. Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out the minor interventions through which they assert individual and collective agency. During my time in Văldinești, it became apparent that the suspension of the construction works and the years of waiting for the project’s completion generated a cloud of speculations and hypotheses about the fate of the water project. In Anya’s understanding, for instance, the fault lies in the disconnected electricity wires, but her version is only one of many which overlap and contradict each other, ranging from slowdowns caused by highly bureaucratized approval procedures, to lack of funds in the public budget and, among the most agreed upon ones, high levels of corruption which led to mismanagement of funds. While they might be aimed at uncovering the reasons behind the suspension of construction works, whether or not their content finds some correspondence in reality is irrelevant. The analytical potential of rumours and hearsay lies in their ability to reveal “the contours of local and regional concerns” as well as situated power relations, interests and embodiments (White, 1994, p. 78). On an individual level, they operate as tools for sense-making and as such, play a central role in the poetics of waiting for water in the village. On a collective level, they are performative occurrences whose circulation reinforces anxiety, despairs, hopes about the completion of the project, but they also hold the potential to pave the way for political intervention by questioning the authority of the local administration. Considering the lack of transparency and coherence of official narratives regarding the state of the water project, rumours and hearsay are pathways of coping with the state of in-betweenness, wherein the villagers can neither start enjoying the comforts of the promised piped water nor leave behind the practices and bricolages adapted to meet their water. Speculative accounts of corruption and incompetence reveal a deep sense of distrust in the authorities (Harvey & Knox, 2015) and thus, they operate as potent social tools through which collective interests and claims are advanced. Such rhetorical manifestations open a terrain for negotiations through which village residents seek accountability for the failures in implementing the project and operate as forms of everyday resistance against the imposed waithood for water. 

Afterword: in between present suspension and future modernity

The story of water in Văldinești is as much about a life-sustaining substance as it is about the socio-economic, political and environmental transformations in a post-Soviet village. Considering the disinvestment in rural areas both during USSR and following its collapse, the villagers cope with water insecurity by waiting for systematic interventions from the local administration, all the while relying on strategies of self-provisioning. The infrastructural water project, whose completion is uncertain both for the villagers and the local administration, brought along the promise of offering a long-term solution for the problem of water scarcity.  But more so, this infrastructural endeavour is also indexical of the ideal of progress and rural modernisation. In the individual and collective future imaginary, access to tap water aligns with a linear trajectory of development which addresses the neglect of rural areas throughout the Soviet period and following the aftermath of transition. In this manner, the project promises to bring not only the tangible benefit of water access but also the symbolic potential of inclusion in the archetype of the “modernised” post-socialist village. The construction site is imbued with affective entanglements (Reeves, 2017) that both create and disrupt the hope for an improved quality of life. In practice, the ways used to obtain water have not changed, but in the shared understanding of individual and collective rural life, the articulated vision of the future has launched a positionality of no return, which will endure as a yearning for a not-yet-materialized future until the potential conclusion of the construction work.

REFERENCES:

Baviskar, A. (Ed.). (2007). Waterscapes: The cultural politics of a natural resource. Delhi: Permanent Black.

Gupta, A. (2018). The future in ruins: Thoughts on the temporality of infrastructure. In N. Anand, A. Gupta & H. Appel, The Promise of Infrastructure (pp. 62-79). Duke University Press

Harvey, P., & Knox, H. (2015). Roads: An anthropology of infrastructure and expertise. Cornell University Press.

Reeves, M. (2017). Infrastructural hope: Anticipating ‘independent roads’ and territorial integrity in southern Kyrgyzstan. Ethnos, 82(4), 711–737. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1119176

Simone, A. (2004). People as infrastructure: Intersecting fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture, 16(3), 407–429. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-3-407   

Wagner, J. R. (2013). The social life of water. Berghahn Books.  

White, L. (1994). Between Gluckman and Foucault: Historicizing rumour and gossip. Social Dynamics, 20(1), 75–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533959408458562