Yes, its been a wee bit of time since I last wrote or updated this blog. Please accept my apology. I have no good excuse except to say that since I last wrote, I've moved into a great house and started working more normal hours so I'm now sane and have time to sit and think about writing posts that hopefully aren't torturously boring.
So for those of you that have faithfully stuck with me, thank you. I've got lots of good stories waiting to be posted.
Last week I woke up to a beautiful lake view. A lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains, with the sun rising over the mountains on the western shore, painting the snow and its reflection in the water a rose colour. Today I'm looking at another lake view. Only this lake is my front yard. And back yard and side yard.It rained Wednesday- the first hard rain of the season. (To recap, there are four seasons in Dar- the hot season, the long rains, the cool season and the short rains.) And it really does get cool in the cool season. 75 as a high for the day sometimes- we all put on jeans and long-sleeve shirts. (Yes, it really does feel cold, I'm not the only crazy one.)
So first I should point out that I arrived back here Tuesday morning at about 9- and at about 10 a transformer blew in the neighbourhood and the power went out. As everyone put it... welcome back to Dar. Shockingly enough when I climbed out of bed today, hoping to start the weekend on a good note with power, well... there was no power. But a story about a 5th day without power just wouldn't be interesting.
About noon last Weds it started to rain. Not dainty rain, not even hard rain, but buckets of water. Buckets. Like in a bad Hollywood/Bollywood movie where all seems lost for the leading couple until the romantic lead runs through the rain to kiss the girl and wins her heart forever. Only in the movie the water never seems to be muddy and full of small, dead animals. And I imagine doesn't carry cholera and dysentery and other fun things. But I digress... suffice it to say, it rained a lot. Buckets of rain. Inches and inches and inches of rain.
I didn't think much of the rain (or the flooded streets, but the flooded streets deserve their own post) until I arrived home on Weds. My yard was full of water- flooded, just like the streets I had driven through. I live in an area called Namanga, which I've now found out is prone to flooding. 'Prone to flooding' is a bit funny for me to write after I've seen my guard wading through two feet of water in places the past few days. I think two feet of water counts as flooding, but I would almost want to be able to give it a stronger adjective- excessive flooding maybe. But I feel like I should save the term 'excessive flooding' for when I see four feet of water, which I'm expecting to see any day now.Our house, as well as a few other houses around us, sits slightly lower than the road. You drive over a ridge when coming in our gate- the ridge is to keep water from the road out of our yard and it works surprisingly well. When I drove through the gate on Weds I was hoping to come home to a calm oasis in the storm. However, I drove into a lake. Or what I thought was a lake on Weds- I would now describe it as a pond. The house sits in the center of the lot and is on the highest point in the yard. The yard was relatively full of water, but there were still areas directly surrounding the house that were dry. The lack of electricity meant that there was no way to pump the water out of the yard, and therefore we had to wait until the landlord arrived with a pump to remove the water.
Thursday morning I went to work hoping the dark, ominous clouds would find another home before they decided to release their water. Sadly for me, at about lunch they decided to destroy my dream. The clouds opened and when I left work, I had an image of my roommate and I bailing water out of our living room. (My image of us bailing included me wearing my Wellington boots that I brought back from the states, which are the talk of the neighbourhood. Navy blue with pink edging, compliments of Gap, they are quite bright. And this week they were the most wonderful thing that I own, since they kept my legs dry and away from all the floating dead things when I had to walk through a foot of water in some parts of the yard.)
When I arrived home it was no longer a pond, it was truly a lake. (And let's all hope that I never start an entry saying that it was no longer a lake but rather an ocean.) But thankfully the lake was only surrounding the house and not inside the house. The house is rimmed by concrete and sits about 6 inches off the ground at its lowest point- the water was between 1-2 inches below the level of the porch and close to two feet deep around the edges of the yard. (1-2 inches below the porch may sound like a lot, but here that can be 30 minutes of rain.) The pump had arrived, but took awhile to get working since the first hose was too small, the second too large. Once the pump started, for a long time it looked like nothing was happening since the rain was coming down about as fast as the pump could remove water from the yard. But finally the rain cleared and the water started to slowly, slowly recede.
The irony of having water everywhere was that there was no water for the house. The way internal plumbing water works for many houses in Dar is that it's pumped from either a truck or the city system into a tank on the ground and from that tank it's pumped up to a tank on the roof. Gravity then forces it through the pipes and out the faucets. When there's no electricity, the water sits in the tank on the ground and there's no water for the house. Last night the water in the tank ran out, so I have no water.
As of now, I'm still living my life-long dream of a lake-side house. Though the water lapping at my porch maybe is a bit worrying and the fact that I have to wear my Wellies to get to my car is also a wee bit worrying. And of course there still isn't power and I'm terrified to open the fridge since we haven't been able to clean it because there hasn't been trash collection. And oh dear, it just started to rain again. Maybe I should put a bucket outside to catch some clean rain water to bathe.An update...
I wrote this post yesterday morning and since then there have been a few updates. (Lack of power preventing me from posting in a timely fashion and all.) Yesterday's rain was minimal and power returned last night. We were able to pump water to the roof, meaning the internal functioning of my house is now normal. (Well, except for the fridge which can easily be classified as a biological hazard.) As for the lake, the water is still being pumped out of my yard. Yes, still. But hopefully enough will be removed that the sun can start to dry out parts of the yard. As for today's power situation... it doesn't seem to want to stay on for more than a few minutes. But hey, at least I'm not floating.
So if anyone's interested in occasional lake-front property... I can arrange a showing.
