Water

Before living here, I have never ever given water two seconds of my time. It was a given and always has been in my life. Running water has always been present and I would even venture to say that 95% of houses in both Charlotte and Marietta have running water or more. Being here has made me realize what a life giving source water truly is and how water days can be the highlights of my week and how toilets that work are wonderful.

Last week made me aware of all of this and so I’ll fill you in on our week of water wackiness. However, some foundation needs to be set here. Water arrives at our house on Mondays and Fridays. When I say it arrives, I mean we actually have water that comes out of the taps and sometimes the shower heads from about 8 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon. Sundays and Thursdays are what we call bonus days. Yes, on the bonus days, after the whole town has taken what they needed, any left over water surprises us and gives us something to be extra thankful about. On the days when water does not come, we got to the pilla or the big bathtub of water in the back yard and fill up buckets to shower with and wash dishes. So that is our water situation.

Two weeks, we chose not to fill up the pilla on Monday because we needed to clean it. Cleaning the pilla is an adventure in itself you have to empty it, get in it and scrub with a big brush, and then rinse, and then fill it up again. Well, when Friday arrived, our pilla was very very low on water…and we waited and waited and waited for water to arrive and well it never did. So with little water, we knew we would just have to wait till Monday for some more. At this point, the pilla that is about 4ft deep had probably less than a foot of water and for me to scoop water out of it, I literally had to rest my stomach on the edge and lean in so far that my tippy toes would not even touch the ground. Needless to say, we were all very ready for water to arrive. On Monday, water did not arrive until 10:30 or so and we were finally able to clean the pilla and fill it to about 2ft.

Monday also happened to be the days that both toilets decided not to work. A. This is not good at all….ever. B. This is especially not good in a country where the most common illness for foreigners is diarrhea and C. This is especially not good when flushing the toilet literally means pouring a bowl or two of water until it all trickles down. And so the toilets wouldn’t flush…both of them. We couldn’t figure out if there was a tank that was full or what was going on. Plumbing over here is quite confusing. Thank goodness for Fatima, a lady on our formation team who knows everything and anything, who told us that pouring a large amount of bleach would unclog the toilet. And it did…yay!

I am happy to say that today we have a pilla full of water because it has rained at least twice a day and most of the night for the past three days and that we have toilets that are fully functioning and flushing delightfully. Of course, two minutes after I wrote that, Tyler came in to tell us that in road construction they hit a large pipe and that we probably wont be getting water till next week….if that… I guess its one of those things that you don’t realize how lucky you are until you come close to running out of water and the toilet doesn’t work.