Water matters
by prudence on 04-May-2013
Water has been quite a theme this week.
We buy our drinking water in big plastic containers (called "galon", although they hold much more than a gallon), which are then upended on top of a device that dispenses the water either at room temperature or heated (or even extra hot, if you press the "extra hot" button).
One of our galon decided to leak this week, letting water into lots of places it shouldn't be (with the bizarre result that we had hot water coming out of the cold tap).
But this was a minor matter compared with our next water issue. Our washing water comes from a well at the back of our house. And one day this week we woke up to discover we had none. Or rather, none except for a few inches at the bottom of the bak. The water from the well reaches our tank by means of a pump, which plugs into a socket in the outside wall. Unknown to us, the plug and socket had burnt right out at some point over the course of the last few days, and so the tank had gradually been emptying. However, we are lucky to be well (ha ha) looked after by kind colleagues, and one of them brought a tradesman round that afternoon to replace the burnt out bits. Very nice to be able to fill that bak up again...
Because our water has been murky for a while, necessitating frequent drainings of said bak to get rid of the sediment, this weekend brought an attempt to clean out the well. There's a special word for this -- menguras, which is to drain, often with the purpose of cleaning -- and a team of three came to do it. They suck all the water out, and then a guy goes down the five-meter-deep well, on a rope held by a colleague, to scrub it all up. He brought quantities of crap up, including various old buckets, rubble, and a couple of sacks. They said they hadn't managed to get it completely clean, but never mind, all the mud that's now all over our backyard is better there than in our water supply.
Last week brought no rain, and we wonder if we have finally arrived in the dry season. But the rice farmers are still planting -- we saw some just this morning on our walk to Giwangan -- so they at least must think there's still rain in the offing. When the rain stops, I'm told, they turn to dry weather crops like sago, maize, and cassava.
It's just rained a bit outside. But only a bit...
We buy our drinking water in big plastic containers (called "galon", although they hold much more than a gallon), which are then upended on top of a device that dispenses the water either at room temperature or heated (or even extra hot, if you press the "extra hot" button).
One of our galon decided to leak this week, letting water into lots of places it shouldn't be (with the bizarre result that we had hot water coming out of the cold tap).
But this was a minor matter compared with our next water issue. Our washing water comes from a well at the back of our house. And one day this week we woke up to discover we had none. Or rather, none except for a few inches at the bottom of the bak. The water from the well reaches our tank by means of a pump, which plugs into a socket in the outside wall. Unknown to us, the plug and socket had burnt right out at some point over the course of the last few days, and so the tank had gradually been emptying. However, we are lucky to be well (ha ha) looked after by kind colleagues, and one of them brought a tradesman round that afternoon to replace the burnt out bits. Very nice to be able to fill that bak up again...
Because our water has been murky for a while, necessitating frequent drainings of said bak to get rid of the sediment, this weekend brought an attempt to clean out the well. There's a special word for this -- menguras, which is to drain, often with the purpose of cleaning -- and a team of three came to do it. They suck all the water out, and then a guy goes down the five-meter-deep well, on a rope held by a colleague, to scrub it all up. He brought quantities of crap up, including various old buckets, rubble, and a couple of sacks. They said they hadn't managed to get it completely clean, but never mind, all the mud that's now all over our backyard is better there than in our water supply.
Last week brought no rain, and we wonder if we have finally arrived in the dry season. But the rice farmers are still planting -- we saw some just this morning on our walk to Giwangan -- so they at least must think there's still rain in the offing. When the rain stops, I'm told, they turn to dry weather crops like sago, maize, and cassava.
It's just rained a bit outside. But only a bit...