Water

Yesterday after I had just concluded the bulk of the housework, I discovered that the washing machine wouldn't work.  I tried starting it up but for some reason no water would pour into the belly of the machine.  I then went to the sink and found nothing but the tiniest trickle.  The toilet wouldn't flush and now I was without a doubt that something was up.

Our supply of drinking water (which sits in a plastic container perched on the top of our drier) was only a quarter full and we had no water in the refrigerator to speak of.  So, Selah and I took a walk over to the hospital grounds, key and extra large water bottle in hand, and we tried to get more drinking water out of the spigot that we normally use.  Nothing.  Not even a drop came from the faucet.  On our way back home one of our neighbors on the compound saw us and asked if we too had lost our water supply.  Yep.

My mind immediately shot to the times in Houston when hurricanes blew through and we were to fill our tubs with tap water and to stock up on bottled water.  Usually we have some forewarning.  This time there was none.  Oddly enough, that morning our phone line had been out for more than five hours and we also were not getting any signal for our Internet connection.  In one fell swoop I found myself unable to do dishes, laundry, cleaning, cooking, email, Skype, blogging, or phone calling.  Hmmmmm.

Well, I saw this as a blessing.  I had just washed the sheets on the beds, done two loads of laundry, and finished the dishes.  I had no immediate need for water so we could manage a bit without it.  When everyone came home for lunch, we ate off of napkins, drank out of juice boxes I'd been saving for a road trip, and tried to make as little of a mess as possible.  In the afternoon, Selah--who had been sick all week with a sinus infection--and I hung out at home with little we could do.  It was a peaceful time; Selah played with her dolls and I put pictures in our scrapbook.  When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.  Or in our case, when you have no water or technology, work on a hobby.  A blessing.

Since we still didn't have water by evening time, we chose to go to the one place in Shell where we could get hamburgers.  No cooking meant no dishes and no clean up.  When we got home, we couldn't take showers so we had even more time on our hands.  So instead of a slew of activity prior to bedtime with dishes and showers, we had a nice time of playing board games and chatting about our day.  Another blessing.  (Though I don't think we smelled that good.)

Breakfast dishes this morning piled up and so did those I had to use to make lunch.  We still did minimal prep but cups and silverware and the occasional pan were required here and there.  Before I knew it I had a sink full of dishes so I boiled some water that we brought from the school half a mile away (Praise God our neighbor was willing to cart our oversized water bottled in his car) and began to wash our dishes.

I'm happy to report that as of this evening we finally have SOME water--enough to flush toilets (PTL) and wash our hands.  We've been told by our neighbor who's been working on the problem that it probably won't be fixed completely till Monday.  Apparently the road work that's in front of the hospital is the cause of our problem and the workers were not careful when digging around pipes that feed our water supply.  No one really wants to accept responsibility for the accident so having it fixed may be delayed.

It took me about an hour to wash the sink full of dishes since I had to be especially careful of the water we used.  I'm so grateful for the little water we have.  And, to boot, we had 9 hours of straight sunshine today (I think it's a record) and finally when it ended after 3, we all put our buckets outside to catch the rainwater as it fell from the sky.  We then brought the two inches that had accumulated in the two hours since into the house so we could use that too.

In all of this, we decided that water is a precious thing and worth conserving.  It's also not worth the energy and emotion to get ourselves bent out of shape about the situation.  We can manage these modifications to our lives for a bit--we may even find some hidden blessings here and there in the process.  All in all, life is good.