Half-listening, she pulls out a weathered clipboard and begins committing to paper her mental records from the morning’s deliveries: P. Yazzie – 1,200. D. Yazzie – 165. J.V. – 55. O.M. – 275. E. Long – 55.

Math was her favorite subject in school; numbers always clicked for her. With the deliveries she’s made so far, she calculates that there’s still enough in the truck’s 3,500-gallon tank to visit six more houses before she has to turn back for her afternoon school bus shift.

A muffled clatter draws her eyes from the clipboard, prompting her to peek at the side-view mirror. She laughs and jumps out. The trailer home’s owner, Benjamin Lewis, has commandeered the water hose. Darlene ambles over, teasing him good-naturedly in Navajo. Dressed in jeans, a striped button-up shirt, and a cream-colored cowboy hat, the 68-year-old Vietnam veteran cracks a grin and shouts, “I wish I could stay young like this forever!”

Benjamin grew up nearby on the reservation and remembers trekking a mile each way, at least twice a week, to a windmill-powered well with his siblings and the neighbors’ kids. Someone would push a wheelbarrow filled with empty containers. “It was kind of fun,” he recalls. They enjoyed playing in the area around the windmill. When they got tired of horsing around, the kids would fill the containers and push them back to the house, leaving them outside on a wooden bench for communal use.

Since he moved to his current home in 1998, Benjamin has been waiting for the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority to put in a new water line. Baca Chapter, the division of the Navajo Nation that governs this area, installed a septic tank for his bathroom, but he had to haul water from a nearby windmill-powered well for it to work. He used to fill his drinking barrels there too, until he found a sign posted on the well warning that the unregulated, untreated water had tested positive for uranium (a vestige of the area’s now shuttered mining industry), coliform bacteria, and nitrates from livestock waste.

Benjamin wasn’t surprised. “There’s a lot of other windmills besides the one here that I know have been contaminated. Just about almost every windmill out here, you can see signs on.”

He could have gotten water at his mom’s house, a little over 8 miles to the north, but he would have only been able to carry small containers. After seeing the yellow truck out for delivery, he approached Darlene and asked to be added to her route. Now Benjamin has relied on her to supply water for the past two years.

Workers from the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority showed up on Benjamin’s property with a backhoe last year, and he was hopeful they would move ahead with the new water line. Instead, they only dug a shallow hole that they covered up again before the end of the day. The ground was too hard, they explained, and regulations forbade them from using dynamite to break through it. They promised to return with different equipment. That was last summer. He hasn’t heard a word since.

“I’m well-set here,” Benjamin says. “Really, I don’t have anything to complain about but the water. But one of these days I’ll get it. With the coming spring, I’ll probably have running water.”

When Darlene was growing up on the reservation, her family didn’t have an indoor tap. At least once a week they hauled their barrels several miles to fill them at their church’s well. She and her sisters washed their hair only on Sundays and Thursdays. When doing the dishes, they would save the rinse water for washing the next round. She remembers her grandfather, a medicine man who made the family’s moccasins, frequently chastising her and her siblings, “You need to save the water!”

She graduated from Thoreau High School and settled nearby after marrying a ranch hand, Tom, who had also grown up on the Navajo Nation. The couple worked hard to provide for their family—four kids, plus Darlene’s mom, grandmother, and several nieces and nephews. Back then, Darlene was a self-employed jewelry maker, crafting earrings and other pieces out of silver.

As the kids got older, though, she grew tired of being a silversmith. In 2002, she told Tom she wanted to work as a school bus driver. He went with her to an employment office, where she signed up to earn her commercial driver’s license. Driving home, the future looked bright.

But one week before her test, a horse fell on top of Tom while he was training it, and he died of his injuries. Their oldest child had just graduated from high school; their youngest was 8. The burden of providing for the family rested squarely on Darlene’s shoulders.

She took a job driving a water truck for an Albuquerque, New Mexico–based construction company, which laid her off after a few months. She went to a similar job at another company, only to be laid off again.

Between Darlene’s unemployment benefits, her eldest daughter’s income as a heavy machinery operator, the younger children’s survivors’ benefits, and the extra cash that her two sons brought in chopping and selling firewood, the family cobbled together a living. “We had our own house—all we needed was to pay for water, electricity, and propane for cooking. We made it through,” she says. It was a difficult, frustrating time, “but there were more blessings.”

She knew that St. Bonaventure Indian Mission offered help to people in the community, including house repairs, food, clothing, and utility assistance, “but I thought it was for people who really needed help.”

It wasn’t until the family couldn’t pay their electric bill that she finally went to ask for assistance. While filling out the paper-work, she gave her CDL to the receptionist, who immediately called executive director Chris Halter.

A new diesel-powered Chevy C8500 had arrived just one month earlier. It was custom-fitted with a food grade water tank, as well as a special suspension system designed to mitigate the wear and tear brought on by the reservation’s rocky terrain. But Chris hesitated to send it out for delivery. “I needed someone to take care of this water truck and make it last for a long time.” Watching how roughly his drivers—all men—handled the old truck and the mission’s other vehicles convinced him that St. Bonaventure needed a female driver.

So Chris told his staff to pass along the word about the opening to any female truck drivers they knew. And then Darlene walked in. “I thought, She’s precisely what I’m looking for,” he recalls. He hired her the next day.

After eight years she still finds the work deeply rewarding—it resonates with the values of her Navajo upbringing and her Christian faith. “Plus I know how it is to have no water,” she says, “so I want to help.”

Today, everyone in the community knows Darlene as the Water Lady, waving when they pass on remote stretches of road and coming out to chat when she arrives at their home. The staff at St. Bonaventure calls her their eyes and ears—and her help isn’t limited to water delivery.

If someone’s roof is wearing out, Darlene tells the mission to dispatch a repair crew to the residence. If a household needs lamp oil or warm clothing or nonperishable food, she drops by the next time she’s in the area. She often spends extra time visiting with the elderly, filling them in on their kids’ lives or just listening when they want to talk. “Sometimes, if they’re sick and need prayer, I’ll pray with them,” she says.

When she stops by the gas station one morning for a cup of coffee, she runs into a young man whose mother passed away two years ago. Darlene knows he’s been struggling lately, and she offers encouragement and kind words in Navajo.

Back in the truck minutes later, she says, “I’m everybody’s auntie, sister, mom … ”

The number of homes with indoor taps has grown at a plodding pace, and rocky land isn’t the only obstacle. Some people live on land so remote that connecting a house to the existing infrastructure would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, an expense that neither residents nor their chapters can come close to affording.

People can purchase bottled drinking water at the gas station or the Dollar General, but it’s too expensive to buy what a family needs for everyday cleaning and cooking. Some visit coin-operated filling stations in the cities of Crownpoint or Gallup, lugging barrels, tanks, and buckets up to 100 miles round-trip.

St. Bonaventure has an on-site well with a free public spigot, but people are asked to self-limit how much they take home. “You got to look out for the next person,” says office manager Cindy Howe. But hauling water, whether from the city or from the mission, requires transportation—and the strength to lift the full barrels and jugs (5 gallons weighs 40 pounds). For the elderly and the rural poor, delivery is the only option.

Thankfully, St. Bonaventure has help. The mission is collaborating with DigDeep, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit focused on defending the human right to water. Before the partnership with St. Bonaventure, called the Navajo Water Project, DigDeep helped build infrastructure exclusively in Africa. Executive director George McGraw, who studied international law at the United Nations’ University for Peace, was shocked—and embarrassed—when, in 2012, he found out about the conditions on the reservation.

Until he heard from a donor who had visited the Navajo Nation on a mission trip, George hadn’t known that there were people living without running water in the United States. According to the most recent American Community Survey, one-half of one percent of households in the U.S.—about 1.6 million people—lack complete indoor plumbing systems. DigDeep is working to change that, beginning with the Navajo Water Project.

“There are three problems that we’re solving on the reservation,” George says. “First, our current clients aren’t getting enough water. Second, they’re keeping it in barrels, buckets, pickle jars, cups—whatever can hold it. Finally, there are more potential clients that we need to hook up to the project, and the whole system needs to be made more efficient in order to be able to serve them.”

So far, they’ve procured another water truck—which was retrofitted with a new engine and a food-grade tank—and a second driver, allowing St. Bonaventure to double the monthly deliveries. Last November, the next phase began: installing in-home water systems complete with 1,200-gallon underground cisterns, sinks, showers, and electric water heaters. The goal is to equip 205 households by the end of 2018. By far the costliest and most complicated objective is still in the works: drilling a new well at Smith Lake. If all goes according to plan, construction will be underway by March or April, and clients could receive clean Smith Lake water as early as mid-2016.

Eventually the goal is to get running water into all the houses, but realistically that’s a very long-term aim. “I think that, as much as I’d like to say we’ll phase out the water truck in my lifetime, we won’t,” says Chris, who’s 48.

Darlene will continue delivering to every household on the list. She’ll also keep driving the old truck. “This one has air conditioning,” she says with a sly smile.

In the scant shade of a scrawny tree, Darlene peers inside a blue barrel. “That one’s still dirty.” The small plastic caps used to plug the barrels’ openings tend to go missing, letting in bugs and wind-borne debris.

Holding the hose over the barrel, Darlene grips the nozzle’s red handle and releases a gushing stream. She gives the container a swirl and, after dumping out the dirty water, discovers something at the bottom. Tipping the barrel over, she reaches in and pulls out a piece of red garden hose used as a siphon. She hangs it from a tree branch

“Hi!”

Darlene turns at the sound of the young voice to see two boys, 8 and 7, who’ve ventured out of the house at the end of the lot.

She knows the kids well; she brought water here to their grandmother before the grandmother passed away and the boys’ parents moved onto the land. “I took out the hose,” Darlene tells them.

“My mom says the barrel was dirty,” the older kid says, drawing closer. His brother hangs back, observing silently but curiously.

“I cleaned it,” Darlene says. She chats with them about school—they have the day off for Columbus Day—asking where they go, even though she already knows the answer. Then she asks if they have
anything else for her to fill. The two kids disappear into a nearby hogan—an eight-sided house built in traditional Navajo style—and return with an empty 1-gallon apple juice jug. Darlene fills it up at the spigot on the side of the truck. The brothers thank her and turn back toward their house, carrying the now heavy bottle between them.

Back in the driver’s seat, Darlene glances in her side-view mirror and catches sight of the boys pumping their fists. She obliges and honks the horn, laughing as their faces disappear from view.