My youngest son Richard used the visitor’s bathroom. When he was through, he flushed, washed his hands and was about to leave when he noticed that the reservoir of water was almost finished. He turned on the tap and began to refill it. I wondered why he was taking so long in the washroom and asked for an explanation. As soon as he told me he was filling up the drum, I asked him to turn it off and that I’ll do it myself, later. I did not want to give him an excuse to play with water and dirty the bathroom in the process.

I did not remember to fill the container up that day.

Thankfully, we had relatively stable electricity for some days so I ensured we pumped water as often as we could.

A few days later, I went into that particular bathroom and remembered that I had not re-filled the drum with water as promised. “I’ll do it later”, I thought to myself. I was running late for an appointment. Besides, I had forgotten to turn off the tap a couple of times and had to spend several minutes mopping the floor afterwards; I also did not want the possibility of wasting water. I went about my day’s work. Surely, I’ll get to it later.

I didn’t!

A few more days went by and though we often went to sleep with no electricity, they would restore power by the early hours of the morning and we would pump water until the tanks were full. This day was different. I woke up to prepare my kids for school and realized that there was no water coming out of the taps. I decided to quickly use the generating set to pump but the bigger gen won’t start. Thank goodness we had stored water in a few containers so we’d be fine, I thought to myself.

 

I opened the drum in the visitor’s bathroom and the water was just about one-third full. It was barely enough to bathe all my children. We had to fetch from the containers in the kitchen for them to have a proper bath that morning.

 

With very little options left, we had to work at repairing the generator on time with our already lean miscellaneous budget. More than that, we hoped that our Electricity distribution company would restore the power as soon as possible.

#deepsigh!

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