Water, water everywhere--except at my house!

This is a view of my cistern and it is almost empty. You can see all the way to the bottom. Normally my cistern is filled to the top but my neighborhood has not received water from the city for about ten days now. Usually water from the city comes into my cistern three times a week for about 7 hours at a time. This is enough to supply me with the water that I need for cleaning, washing clothes & dishes, showers, etc. This week we have been relegated to bucket baths, using dish washing water to flush toilets, only washing the most necessary of clothes, etc.

I thought it might be interesting to show the normal process of getting water--all the way from water coming into my cistern to water coming out of my faucet.
After my cistern is full, I turn on my pump (for those electricians out there--ignore the fancy wiring!). The pump pulls the water out of my cistern and sends it up to the tank on the roof.
This is a "tinaco" or the tank on my roof. After my pump has pumped the water up to the tank from the cistern in my yard, the water stays in this black tank until I need water it. The tank on the roof provides the water pressure for water in my house pipes. It acts as my own personal "mini water tower".

This system normally works well--except for weeks like this one when I have no water in my cistern to pump up to the roof top tank. So...how do I get water during a week like this week?
I call a pumper truck and after waiting anywhere from 3 hours to 24 hours, it arrives at my house with a 60 foot hose. The hose is snaked through my house and out the back door where it fills my cistern (1300 gallons) with water.

When this occurs occasionally, I can afford this type of truck and water delivery, but many people in Oaxaca can not. A normal water bill is about $4.00 per month. A pumper truck full of water (that lasts about a week if I am careful) costs about $40 per truck.

While this is an annoyance, I am reminded of women in Africa and places in Latin America where women spend most of their day walking to get water and then returning to their homes. This helps put my rather small annoyance into perspective.