Water situation

We are officially out of water in our storage tank. The city water that usually comes in to fill the tank has not come in for a 2 or 3 weeks but we have seen guys down the road working on a water main pipe. Yesterday it looked like they were getting closer to being finished so we are hopeful that water will come in a couple of days.

But we still have access to water – it’s just not convenient. This is where our camping experience comes in handy!! There is a community water tap down the hill from us, near the market. This is where the folks who do not have plumbed water go on a daily basis to collect water in their plastic jugs. It is a very common site to see children and adults carrying water jugs (from 5 liters – 20 liters / 1+ - 5 gallons) down the street. I am constantly amazed to see them carrying full 20 liter jugs on their heads!! When we need to buy water, we have one of our workers get a water guy to bring us some. There are young men who go up and down the streets all day with a wheel barrow full of water jugs – I’ve seen them pushing up to 5 or 6 jugs of water at a time. We have a large drum we put outside our kitchen door that the guys fill for us and then we have buckets in each bathroom that fill for washing up. Our worker, Musengimana, will hand wash some clothes for us today (the machine we have is a European front loading machine which is hard to use without plumbed water – I miss my simpler twin-tub machine we had in Nairobi.) These guys are super strong from pushing their wheelbarrows of water jugs up the hill – especially our dirt road that is full of deep ruts. We pay 250 rwf per 20 liters which is 44 cents. The water itself costs (if we were to go down and get our own jug filled) 100 rwf per 20 liters so these guys are making 26 cents per jug or about
$1.50 per wheelbarrow, if they can handle 6 jugs at a time. My guess would be that from our street to the water tap plus waiting in line, round trip would take them 45 minutes to an hour. We hear their wheelbarrows starting around 5 am and they keep going all day until dark (6 pm or so). I’d say they might make $8 - 10 a day hauling water!

The kittens we have are getting big and harder to contain in a safe place. We gave up last night and let them be free – figuring they were more apt to get hurt trying to get out than being out. They are so cute running around in the garden. I just hope they don’t find a small hole somewhere and get stuck! They are trying to figure out if they should be friends with the dog. Their mom is very friendly with the dog so I think they’ll warm up to her soon enough. The African gray parrot may be a harder friendship to create – I don’t know – but again the mom cat and the bird get along ok. (I’ve even seen them “kiss” – very funny!)

Well, I’m off to get breakfast and then to work. It looks like we’ve got a 1st grade teacher now. He won’t get here until a month or so after school starts but at least he’s coming. The other big hole is Kindergarten and we are realizing we could use another middle school teacher – we have full classes which we weren’t expecting. We had planned on doubling up a couple classes (like soc. Studies or Bible) but now with the larger classes we can’t do that so we need to have more teachers to cover each class. I think it will work out – the teachers will just be stretched.