Sabils, or charitable water fountains, are a key location for exploring vernacular water architecture and investigating the underlying conceptual frameworks that give them life. The city of Cairo, Egypt has a long history of sabils (and sabil-kuttab) that form an integral part of the urban landscape, drawing on religious precedence and enacting both cosmological and everyday ethical notions of reciprocity. Sabils are particularly important in the changing environmental conditions of Cairo and point to the ways in which small-scale water infrastructure can add to the picture of urban water resilience in the context of Climate Change. Materially, the expansion of vernacular sabils is a response to the experience of transversing increasingly hot urban spaces and residents’ lived experience of unfolding climate change. The focus of this research are the four predominant contemporary vernacular forms of charitable water fountains in urban spaces: olla, zeer, coleman, and coldaire. These vernacular forms reshape public and semipublic urban spaces to provide palatable and preferred water free of charge to people as they live their daily lives; shopping, traversing and doing business on Cairo’s streets in the “city inside-out” (Bayat 2012). Ethnically, the establishment of a sabil enables the accumulation of hassnet, or merits accrued with god, in the Islamic tradition and are one of a limited set of posthumous avenues through which souls can shift the balance of good and bad that they take with them to judgement day. As such, people create sabils as one way of building towards a future afterlife for themselves and departed loved ones. This paper will discuss four interrelated aims that residents of the informal area of Ezbet Khairallah articulated for creating a sabil- as attempts to be good, work towards being kind, to manage grief, and to solve practical problems. The paper will additionally outline some of the practices of maintenance and care that sabil-keepers invest in order to offer clean, cool, good smelling water.