What about that water?

Jack the Cat doesn't haul water

As many of you are already aware, water isn't something that's provided to my house 24/7. Some seasons we have water in the pipes most of the time. Other seasons, water comes for a couple of hours every two or three days.

But on the third day, we start wondering, when's the water going to come?

Recently, we had a greater water problem. Water had been coming every day for several hours at a time, so we weren't really worried about water usage. But then, two days before Annie's parents arrived, the water didn't come. 

That's fine. We've got storage barrels. We'll be fine.

But the water didn't come. Our larger neighborhood and the one next to it didn't have water due to a water main being broken. But people were fixing it.

Day 6 we hauled water from a teammate's house. Surely they'll have it fixed soon!

Day 7 the neighborhood got water again. But we didn't. Wait, what's going on?

Day 8 we found out that a neighbor had gotten tired of a water line leaking near his house, so he cut. Word was, he'd cut it in two places, but we didn't know where the second place was.

flying to another island

I tried to reach the property manager for him to deal with the problem, but he was out of town and said that, since I was nearby, I had to take care of it. He didn't want to be involved. Neighbors who heard said "oh, he's run away because the house owner (his cousin) is coming back to the island next week and he's been mismanaging the property and the money."  Well, that's good.

 We hauled water from the neighbor's spigot and filled all the buckets, then Annie and her parents headed to the little island and I headed to another island for the weekend. It only took another week and a dozen or more phone calls to get the water fixed.

But hey, it's free!

Sometimes, it's all uphill

Before I get into this topic, please realize that I'm not writing to complain. I don't really blame most of the people involved for their part in the problem. They're just part of a complicated system, and right now the system isn't working in my favor.

See, I have this class. They're all adults, no teens involved. All but one of them are gainfully employed, with several of them holding important jobs. They want to learn English, mostly for their job, or for travel. So a community organization asked for a teacher (me) and put together a class list. It started with 28 students, even though I normally limit a class to 25.

Out of those 28, I've never had more than 23 show up on a given day. But we were making progress. I taught the class one day a week and an islander taught it on another day each week. We made it 3/4 of the way through the book, when...

Ramadan happened.

And since classes for adults normally occur around sunset-- the same time at which everyone is breaking the fast-- we couldn't hold classes for a month.Then we waited an extra week after Ramadan because a lot of the women were fasting an extra week (for personal reasons).

But the problem is, things here have a consistency issue. If something happens every week, people will come. If it's every day, they're even more likely to come. Every month is more difficult... then you have to call and remind everyone, because it's not in their routine.

And something that was happening and then was on break for over a month? It's a struggle. Since the break we've had 5 class sessions-- class 1 we reviewed with 5 students, class 2 the other teacher didn't come, class 3 I had 4 students (not enough to teach a lesson), class 4 the students didn't come because it was too close to a holiday, and class 5 was today. I had 7 students and decided to teach the lesson anyway.

Moral of the story? Finish classes before Ramadan, or hold low expectations for after.