mishmish: Summer of Guests

It's been a long time since we've posted anything on this blog. We've had a very busy summer, capped off by almost 2 months of non-stop guests and now we have started our 3rd semester in language school. Annamarie's parents came for three weeks, and while they were here some friends of ours and their toddler came for a week. Finally, after everyone had left a Sudanese family from our church here came after Sudan Air cancelled their flight back to Sudan on the night they were supposed to fly home. After 12 days, they did fly home, but not without a lot of drama imposed on all of us by the airline. The details of that drama may perhaps be the subject of a later post.

This post, though, instead deals with the effects of all those guests on the water supply in our apartment. You see, water is in short supply in this mostly desert nation. Each housing unit has a metal tank--usually two by four meters in size and found on the roof of the building--in which the water for that housing unit is stored. The government pumps water into these tanks once each week, and if you run out before your "water day", you just have to wait. We have had to adjust to doing our cleaning and laundary once a week but that isn't such a big deal. Although sometimes the flow of the water being pumped is blocked, and sometimes in the summer months less water is pumped in, receiving water just once per week is usually not a problem for us.

This was a problem, though, during our period of guests. For a month we had between four and seven people here, meaning we had to make a concerted effort to conserve our water. This meant sharing flushes, growing a closet full of dirty laundry, leaving dirty dishes occasionally (not so bad) and taking infrequent showers (sometimes bad). Even with all of this, though, we still ran out twice and used nearly every drop in the tank another time. Certainly making the extra effort to save all the water possible is not the greatest hardship one can experience in life - at least we have water! Once everyone left, we flushed at will, did all of our laundry, washed all those dirty dishes and showered two days in row. Back to normal. It is something worth mentioning, though, just because it is one of the many differences between our homeland and our home now.