Fred de Sam Lazaro:

It's efficient, but also expensive to install, and well out of reach of most Cape Town residents, especially the 20 percent who live in neighborhoods like Langa, unincorporated settlements that are a legacy of apartheid, or official racial separation.

There's no running water in homes here. A single communal tap might serve several dozen families. Still, conditions are better than last year, when some of these taps would come on for only limited hours. And it is far better here than many other parts of South Africa.

Five hundred miles away, in Makhanda, population 70,000, some taps have already run dry. Residents like Noxolo Saki wait in line for hours for a two-day supply of drinking water.

So what have you been doing to cope?