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Published: February 26th 2011
Electric pump
We have to switch it on every day during 30 minutes.In September in Tamil Nadu it's rainy season or, also called, monsoon. This year it arrived pretty late (maybe because of “climatic change”?) but, anyway, it arrived and it didn't stop raining for some weeks.
India is a confrontating country and we have much rain. On the other hand, it can still be pretty difficult to get water at home.
In my village we have some manual water pumps and you can go and get some water from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. each morning. There is such a pump in front of our house and you can see many women filling the buckets up every morning.
We are lucky in that we have a more modern system. Look! We have an electric pump. If you switch it one every day for 30 minutes, you can get enough water to fill two tanks up. Normally it is Ragaban, our gardener (and many other things) who looks after the pump. If you keep it switched on for more than 30 minutes, you will lose a lot of water because the tank will overfill, so you have to be careful! And it's important to remember that this pump needs electricity
The pipe
Sometimes full of air! to work so, when there is a blackout here, we don't have light and we don't have water... cool! We also have a pipe. Sometimes this pipe is full of air and the water can't come into our place so, we have to go there (in the middle of the jungle!) and turn the pipe tap on and wait for a minute and turn it off again (and pray?).
Very complicated system right?? Am I sure that we are lucky? Or maybe I should just start going to the manual pump and fill a bucket up?
Anyway, this story started on Monday, November 15th at 10 p.m. when my collegue and me were sitting in front of the house and we realized that we didn't have water. The process then began: I went to the pipe and opened the tap. I waited but there wasn't any water. I thouhgt it was because of the electric pump (maybe Ragaban didn't switch it on?). So, I went to the pump and switched it on. I waited for 30 minutes and I tried to get some water again. No water. I went to the pipe again, I opened the tap and, again,
Sossi
She fills up some buckets every morning in the public fountain. no water coming out. 11 p.m. I decided to go to sleep and I thought about this usefull word in Tamil: Nale!!! (which means tomorrow).
November 16th, 6:30 a.m. I woke up early, as I do every day. I tried to turn the tap on but we didn't have any water. I thought “Come on Carol, let's do it again!”. I went to the pipe but the water was not there. I thought about switching on the pump but we didn't have power and also, we did it the day before so... there should be water.... I went to the roof to check out the taps of the tank but I didn't see anything different or special.
I decided to just take it easy and wait for my flatmate who was still sleeping.... maybe she would have an idea??
I chatted for a while in skype and wrote some mails.
9:00 a.m. Lourdes (my flatmate) woke up and we decided to phone our boss. He took a lot of time to pick up the phone and finally he said “Oh sorry Carol, I was having a shower”. (Lucky you!!!)
He had a brilliant idea “Maybe Ragaban did something....”
(someone's fault, very good!). He said he would ring Ramesh, who lives near our place, and maybe he would help us.
Ramesh appeared after 5 minutes, still in his pyjamas. He had a look in the bathroom and tried to turn the tap on, he went to the tank, the pipe and the pump (just to look). He spent some minutes thinking and thinking and finally he came up with a conclusion: “You don't have water”. Good job guy! (Oh, God!).
He said that he had water at his place so... he could bring us a bucket of water on his motorbike..... We didn't accept this option but it could be funny, right??
15 minutes later Ragaban arrived. The first thing he said was “I'm sorry, yesterday I didn't switch the pump on because I had to go to the hospital with my wife so... it's possible that you don't have water”. We explained (again) that we did switch the pump on but we still didn't have any water. He started thinking and thinking and finally he came to another conclusion: “Very big problem here!”
Lourdes and me looked each other. We couldn't stop laughing!
It was
raining a lot in Vedanthangal that day. We put a bucket in the garden to collect the rain water. We looked around: we couldn't have a shower, we couldn't wash our clothes or clean the dishes up so, we just sit down and keep chatting on skype.
Ragaban didn't understand anything, he was still very worried about this very big problem. I think he started praying or something because he said: “We just have to wait. At 10 water will come.”
It was serious stuff, specially if you know that, as he said, at 10 o'clock we did have water!
We arrived very late at work that day. Our boss didn't ask anything about the water. Did he miss me because I was late? I don't think so!
By the way! Did I say that the day before this story started my boss was trying to become a plumber without success?
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Paul
non-member comment
so funny - I am laughing
This is hilarious and I'm glad you finally did the story- I remember being on SKYPE with you the morning this happened and you were just cacking yourself (this is English for uncontrolled laughter - well actually it means - literally - laughing so hard that you shit yourself!!!). SO funny .... .what to say? Paul x