ONLY if you have to walk a distance to fill bottles or buckets of water for your daily needs, would you appreciate a piped water supply.
For the villagers of Roma in Naitasiri, just some three hours drive and only a 30 minute walk up steel hills, nothing was more relieving than having to turn on a tap and receive water.
Recently, Johnny Engell-Hansen, the deputy head of the European Union delegation in the Pacific, Sebastiaan De Smet also from the EU, Gael Léopold, the manager of the Rotary Pacific Water For Life Foundation (RPW) and Etika Sing (Projects Coordinator for RPW) were at the village for the opening of the village's new water project, which was funded by the Fiji Water Foundation and the Vodafone ATH Foundation.
With a growing population, the village could no longer supply drinking water to everyone in the village. The RPW had been working for a few weeks with the villagers to find and secure a new water catchment in the hills above the village in order to bring safe drinking water to everyone in the village.
Mr Engell-Hansenputy reminded the villagers of the importance of water in everyone's day-to-day life and also reminisced of his childhood days on an island in Denmark where he also had to struggle for sufficient water.
With this project, the Rotary Pacific Water For Life Foundation has brought safe drinking water to more than 50,000 people in Fiji since 2007 and is looking at doing more projects in the years to come.
If you ever visit the village, you would be thankful that you would not have to do what the "Romans" did to get water.