The Gift of Being Chosen

The Complexity of H2O, West-African Style

We have city water.   I know this for certain, because we were hand-delivered a bill that we must pay in person, at the city office.  Oh good!  City water! That must be nice, not to have to worry about getting water from a well.  It is nice.  However…it is not quite as simple as that.  If you’re looking for an interesting story about the people here, or about what our kids our doing—this isn’t it.   It’s just an attempt to explain (as clearly as possible) how this
city goes about handing out water to its residents, in the hope you might get another small glimpse of life here. 

The city has a water schedule.  Each neighborhood has certain times during the week when the water from the city is turned on, and will then flow through the pipes and into their tanks.  For us, the water comes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; starting around noon.  We have a 400-gallon tank, kind of like our own personal water tower.   So all we need to do is wait for the water to fill the tank, and then we should be all set. 

Except for a few minor difficulties…

The water pressure from the city is often barely enough to trickle out of the end of a hose,  and definitely not strong enough to mount all the way up into the water tower.   OK, well, we have an electric pump that can move the water from two 55-gallon drums up into the tower.   It’s a 220-watt pump, which means that it can be used when the town power is on.  Funny thing is, the town power and the water are never ( well, rarely), on at the same time.  But when the power comes on around midnight, all you have to do is get up and turn on the pump for 15 minutes or so and move some of that water out of the barrels into the tower.  And hopefully you don’t forget to do this, because if you don’t get the barrels emptied before the next time that the city water comes trickling in, you won’t have any place to put it, and then you will miss it completely. 

The house we are staying in has indoor plumbing, for which I am extremely thankful.  And it even works, somewhat.  If the water tower is full, then we have enough water pressure to flush toilets and take showers.   But don’t forget to always, always check and make sure the toilets aren’t slowly running all night long, or you will wake in the morning to find that the water tower has been half emptied during the night and now you have no water coming into your house.  In which case, it’s back to carting in buckets full of water (hopefully the barrels still have some water in them!) for everything:  taking showers, flushing the toilets, washing hands, etc.  

When you were younger, did you ever play those small, square plastic puzzles?  Every square except one was filled, and you had to manoeuver the pieces around very strategically in order to make the correct picture.   Sometimes I feel like life here is one of those puzzles.  Move a little bit forward with the water,  now move a little bit backward because the electricity didn’t come.  If only we could step out of the puzzle and see what the picture is supposed to look like! 

Today, the picture looks a lot like carrying buckets of water and hoping that the electricity will come on.  But maybe, just maybe, tomorrow will look like running water and plenty of electricity.