ABSTRACT
Lack of water, which drove the religious community away in the nineteenth century, is still a serious problem. Father Paolo dall’Oglio explains that when he discovered the abandoned monastery and decided to restore it, water was his first concern. Water that had been used for washing hands and face could be used for washing feet. While Father Paolo is trying to improve conditions in the area of Mar Musa through a combination of spirituality and ecology, Dutch anthropologist Joshka Wessels is trying to achieve the same goal in a more down-to-earth, hands-on way. One way of addressing scarcity on an agricultural level, is to differentiate between types of water, reserving high-quality freshwater for domestic purposes and using lower quality—brackish, saline, and treated wastewater—for agriculture. Leading the region in the use of treated wastewater in agriculture, Israel and Tunisia have been practising this technique for more than thirty years.
