cistern

"He used to hide them in the gutter above his bedroom window and in the toilet cistern - I'd cut open his old teddy bears and he'd stashed them in there - my husband and I didn't know what to do."

“Our dream was to bathe in the river like Parisians used to do 100 years ago,” the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, said in May at the opening of a huge stormwater cistern near to the Austerlitz train station, one of half a dozen major infrastructure projects in a $1.5-billion drive to clean up the river.

Once back home, Yazzie has her son refill a cistern in the family’s yard.

I prodded him and shouted, “Do you have a cistern, a well, anything?”

A tattered Cambodian flag flaps gently in the scorching midday sun on her corner lot, its depiction of the Angkor Wat temple barely still visible, while her brother scoops water from a clay cistern onto a neighbor’s cow that he tends during the day.