Water in the Time of Cholera
Let's take a moment to admire that beautiful, beautiful water behind my feet in the icon that accompanies this post. Sadly, this entry will not feature any such water.
I don't need to rehash the problems we've had since living in this flat, but in case you missed the previous rants, have memory problems, or are a masochist, you can read a smattering here and here. Some problems are exclusive to this flat, some are tied to the building, and others to the country and its lack of infrastructure/current crisis.
Needless to say, the situation is a mess. Somewhat like this:
This is our rooftop, where individual tanks stock water for each flat. There is a central cistern beneath the building, which we'll come back to later. This is the sight that greets you as soon as you climb onto the roof, and in order to access your tank, say to check the water level or admire its lack of cleanliness (we will also get back to this), you have to carefully step in those openings you see on the right. The clearer space you see on the left is inaccessible until you have reached that gray tank in the center at the top of the photo. Anyhow, before you see all that, you have to climb this sorry excuse for a ladder:
That broken rung has broken and been repaired several times since we moved in. One time, it broke beneath me. :-/. Thankfully, I had a good grip on the uprights.
Anyhow, when we moved in, our landlord said he had paid the natour to clean it. She said she did, but did not. Then it turns out, she cleaned "someone's tank, thinking it was ours." Which is BS because she had to climb to the roof many times per week and move a hose between the tanks to fill them, knowing full well who she has filling for. Bon, the tank was filthy and thus remained because she never got around to doing the job before she left, leaving me with the task of doing my best to clean it during one of our waterless spells.
This is the water we flush our toilets with, the water we wash our clothes with, the wather we wash our dishes, bodies, and teeth with...
...
...
My boys look happy to be on the tank because they weren't astride it for three solid houses, moving gunk with inadequate tools and no way to rinse the tank's interior.
"Gunk?" you ask. Yes, this gunk:
Anyhow, that is all backstory to today's post. Yesterday, our neighboor, B, with whom we have given access to our tank on the roof--pumping into his tank, too, when we fill ours--came to tell us that the main cistern was almost out of water and we had better start pumping to get the water "before someone else gets it all." Which, you know, I don't really like the mentality about that, but B has a baby and he is understandably worried about providing for his family. And he is Lebanese and knows the Lebanese mentality.
We turned on the pump, and the water pressure arriving in our tank seemed all right for a while. When J went back to check later, the water was arriving in sporadic bursts. This morning, he went up and the pressure was still weird. I, who have been to the building's basement most recently, offered to go down and check on the state of things. Imagine my horror and surprise when I saw the secondary reservoir that our landlord had promsied to install was empty and had no pump attached to it. I imagined someone must have stolen it.
While down there, investigating, I saw a pipe leaking precious water all over the floor. Just great, I thought, shoddy work and now resources are going to waste. But that amount of water did not account for all the wetness farther away. Just as I was getting ready to take a photo of some water motors, a great stream of filthy water started streaming out of a sewage pipe, right by the building's clean water cistern. I will spare you the 50-second video I then recorded of this horror and just show you this photo instead:
As you can see from the stain down the wall and the water motors nicely lifted out of the worst of the filth, THIS IS NOT A NEW THING! There were even stepping stones set up across the "stream" of sewage.
Did you know that there is a cholera epidemic in Lebanon right now? And we have sewage raining down right over our cistern? Do you see that concrete block behind the tank just below the large water pipe? THAT is our building's cistern. :(
We called our landlord, explained the problem, pointing out that as a medical doctor he should be only too aware of the health risks. And it turns out, the resevoir he promised to set up had NEVER been set up. That green motor receiving all the splash back of sewage is the one that gets *our* water to *our* tank on the roof.
Color me disgusted.