Water, Gas, Electricity

In the college compound there was no running water for five days last week. Needless to say it is very difficult to do anything without water. I was going every day to collect some in a bucket for my house, because luckily there was a tap that was working not too far away from my house – but far enough! The water in the college compound comes from a well, but the tap that we collected water from has its source elsewhere which is why it worked. We were all very grateful that we had this otherwise we would have had to go further to collect water.

It was the first time that I was living without running water in my house for such a long period of time. Normally the water here is good – although we don’t have water from about 11pm to 7am during the night every day and we frequently have no water, it’s only for a few hours during the day time, so it’s okay to manage. Our well pump was broken, but luckily we now have water as the problem has been fixed.

Also, I now have gas! As you will have seen from the pictures of my house in October, I have a cooker in my kitchen. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to use it for the past four months since I’ve been here, as I haven’t had gas. Finally one of the drivers at the college took my cylinder to be filled yesterday and so I can now use my cooker! I had been using a one ring electrical stove, which was extremely time consuming and slow. Also, now whenever we have no electricity, I’ll still be able to cook!

And funnily enough I have no electricity at the moment! The problem has been on-going for the past six days. So I have water, I have gas, but no electricity. It’s frustrating to say the least. And the most annoying thing is that it’s just in my house, as there is some kind of wiring problem. I am waiting for it to be fixed, but have no idea how long it will take. But at least I can still cook on my gas cooker. And I can heat up water for bucket baths.