Water is not only life; it represents power, connection, and possibility. Through its distribution, water becomes a substance that mediates relations between subjects of government and those in authority. Yet it also remains porous and exceeds efforts of control. Lebanon is the most water-rich country in the Middle East. It also holds the most refugees per capita out of any country in the world. The excesses of water and human populations in Lebanon converge most clearly in humanitarianism and the protracted efforts of servicing displaced Syrians. The majority of Syrians in Lebanon live in informal tent settlements (ITS)—decidedly impermanent camp settings, as demanded by Lebanese regulations, which are governed by a range of NGOs. The protracted impermanence of Syrian life has created problems for the humanitarian provision of water. Prevented from connecting to formal municipal water networks, Syrians living in ITS rely on water trucking, which refill household domestic water tanks roughly twice weekly. Through trucking, water becomes a substance suspended in its movement, delivered to a population suspended in displacement. But from the well, to the truck, to the tank, water flows to stagnation. The fears of stagnant water—and the uncertain and unsettling life it could produce—echo the nationalist’s paranoia of a stagnant refugee population. The mimetic movement and settlement of water and human populations invites an Anthropological exploration of ecology, mobility, and assistance. Through 12 months of ethnographic research of water distribution efforts in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, this paper discusses the contradictions and possibilities of water trucking among both providers and beneficiaries of assistance. Far from a singular substance fulfilling a universal humanitarian need, water here takes many forms and possesses a range of meanings depending on its infrastructure of distribution, concerns of purity, and fears of insufficiency. Water and refugee life become entangled in ways that paradoxically resist governmental efforts to segregate displaced people from formal citizen populations.