To add to my growing list of fortes (haha!), I’m now also blogging for Quicket as an event reviewer. I’m very excited about this new venture and look forward to writing many more reviews for them.
On an eerily misty, chilly Saturday evening I attended the Watershed Outdoor Film Screening at the Green Point Urban Park. A handful of people turned out to brave the cold in support of the Watershed Festival and Water Week which ran from the 16-22nd March. I particularly wanted to attend this event because I knew so little about the processes which go into our water supply and more importantly, I wanted to know just how bad the water supply situation is in South Africa and rest of the world. Yes, we know we should fix leaks and shower instead of bathing but there is so much more to the story.
As we waited for the show to start, City of Cape Town representatives handed us questionnaires to complete. This was so that the City could establish how much people actually knew about water conservation. I took this opportunity to ask the representatives, who were very friendly and helpful, some general questions about water and the event itself. I was enlightened to the fact that the City of Cape Town has Blue and Green Drop status. These are awarded based on both drinking water and waste water quality.
The theme of Water Week was b water has no substitute . The City’s director of Water and Sanitation, Peter Flower, opened the show by providing a brief background on Water Week, what national and local government is doing to raise water awareness and what the evening’s event would entail. He also broke the ice by ending with the caption “ remember, bathing together can be fun”. I’ll say!
The line-up included a short film explaining how the City’s water ends up in our taps and the various departments who make it happen. The two main movies were The Water Tower and Who Owns Water. The former was a poignant account of one man’s return to Mount Kenya with a group of climbers. Having climbed the mountain with his family as a boy, he was shocked to find that the mountain had changed, for the worse. The film ended with these words: there were once 11 glaciers on Mount Kenya, by 2050 there will be none . Food for thought, if there ever was any.
The latter of the films, follows two brothers as they return to the river they knew as children and paddle it to the Gulf of Mexico. The film exposes the water wars between three states; Atlanta, Georgia and Florida over the waning fresh water supply. It also exposes how people are claiming parts of the river, begging the question: who owns water?
This event was well worth putting up with the cold, unpredictable Cape Town weather. It has given me a new appreciation for the source of life and has made me think twice before opening the tap and for exactly how long that tap has to stay open when I do use it.
The film screenings continue this week at The Labia theatre until the 24th March. I highly recommend checking it out. Download the Watershed app via the Play or iStore for more information.
xxx Tulips & Phoenixes xxx
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Terrifying how our world is changing and how blasC) society is about using resources such as water and electricity… Also, I just checked out Quicket for the first time and apparently I know NOTHING about what’s happening in the city. So much to do!
Exactly, we need to stop living in our bubbles of ignorant bliss. I totally agree, there’s so much I’ve been missing out on too!