Update: Day 3 No Running Water

So we are now on day 3 of no running water.  I think the last time we had it was Friday night, and it’s now Monday night. Just yesterday I wrote about how we were so lucky to have extra water on hand. At that time I thought, “Surely we’ll have running water again on Monday.”  (The other 2 times in the past 2 weeks when we ran out of water, it usually came back within 8-12 hours).

Today we were down to the last bottle of water and the running water was still not back. To make the situation more urgent, we also are having a business mentor induction training at our office starting tomorrow morning and will have 14 people here all day, with no water.  So we considered our options:

Option 1: Pay someone to go fetch water back and forth for us on a motorcycle. 

• Pros:  Easy for us, and we're able to continue to work and prep for tomorrow’s training
• Cons: Quite expensive and incredibly inefficient

Option 2: Load all of our empty bottles into the car and try to find water.

• Pros:  Much cheaper and more efficient
• Cons: Time away from the office when we still had a lot of work to do, and getting very dirty and sweaty while wearing work clothes (we were not aware of the second con at the time we were deciding)

Fortunately for us, we had these options to choose from; whereas, as I described in the last blog post, so many people who live here don’t have the luxury of making such choices.

We decided to go with the prudent second option, and loaded up the empty bottles and our two jerry cans into the car, and then I drove us down our very bumpy dirt road.  We went to a compound in the neighborhood that one of our staff members knew about where we could pay 300 Ugandan Shillings (or about 12 cents) per jerry can of water. 

All of the jerry cans were stored in a small cement room (the doorway of which is shown in the below photo).  The only catch was that it was self-service, and we couldn't take the jerry cans with us. So began the process of pouring water from the jerry cans using a funnel (which was the top of a 2 litre bottle of water that had been cut off) and filling 20 large water bottles and 2 jerry cans full of water.  

Filling jugs of water from jerry cans with a make-shift funnel

With a little help from the peanut gallery

Our total came to just under 5,000 Ush (or about $2). We then loaded all of the jugs back into the car.

This photo is a bit blurry, but I had to include it to show I was also working and not just taking photos 

Bottles loaded into the car

We were advised by our staff member to take the bottles home and get the other 5-7 bottles that hadn’t fit in the car on the first run, saying it’s very likely that the people who had this water wouldn’t have it anymore later (since our neighbors also didn’t have running water).  However, we still had more work-related errands to run that night so we opted to continue on (and hopefully won't be regretting that decision tomorrow).

We then bounced along the road to town to get supplies for the day tomorrow and to pick up a quick street food dinner, since it was already 7:30 p.m.  When we got home, we had the task of unloading all of the water bottles.  Quite an adventure! And I was definitely not complaining about not being able to work out today!  And also on the bright side, at least the power was back on when we got back!  And I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we get running water tomorrow, or we may be enduring a similar experience in the very near future...