House in Gairo for the Water Project

We are now staying in this brick-plaster house by the ADRA office, completely surrounded by sand and dirt, a couple of trees around but not much else apart from the chickens. This makes it dusty when the wind blows. We mopped all the floors the first day as it has not been lived in for quite a while we think and there was a build up. But is a much better than the little guesthouse room we were in the two weeks before Christmas. The ADRA temporary Gairo office is literally right across the road about 20 meters away. There are mud brick house with thatched or tin rooves beside us. There are lots of little kids around and they sit in the dirt for hours playing or looking at the house waiting to see the mzungus come out. When you walk outside sometimes you hear Mzungu! Mzungu! and you look around a see a kid somewhere waving at you. They are quite cute. All the neighbours seem real friendly and polite. There is no trash removal service as you can imagine. The office security guard dug a hole in the back yard dirt to burn trash in. The first lot we put in there the kids came and took most of it away. But they always seem to be smiling and laughing at us.
When we came to the house the first night from Dar, Ben another Australian volunteer who has joined us in Gairo for a couple of months (but also stayed in the house over the Christmas break) said there was no running water working, 1/2 of the taps leaked when we did get some water, the toilet acted like a sprinkler, some light fixtures were missing, some of the wall power sockets didn’t work. Hence these last 5 days have been a domestic challenge. Jacob with ADRA here has been very good at getting things fixed up. He goes to find the various fundi’s (tradesmen) around town to come to the house to fix something else if we can’t. It sort of worked out well, as we had expected the drillers to come back and start work on the 5th Jan but they got delayed a week, due to full busses and the difficulty setting up accounts here for the drillers to buy fuel on account as they use a lot of it. This week’s delay allowed us to get the house sorted out and to help write an overdue annual report for the Danish embassy on the projects progress to date. As once the drillers start, we will all be out in the field 10 hrs a day and nothing else would have happened. At least now we have the house set up, and are using it as our office with the computers, printer and internet set up. Things here get fixed using the absolute lowest cost way(free if they can find materials lying on the ground that may do the job). So it all seems a bit dodgy and will it last the few months we are to be here is a good question. Gairo has no domestic running water into any houses (except ours now since we are mzungus) so there are no plumbers here. So to get any plumbing done is to use a guy who mainly uses a hammer and a coal chisel. Hot water still seems to be an elusive thing in our African adventure today except in the Dar hotels. The electrician turned up on foot with a screw driver in his pocket.

We had a local carpenter make us a table so we could set our computers up on it to have some ordered working space. A bit of a relief! (We are going to give the table to Jacob, the water engineer, when we move on so he can use it.) The carpenter’s shop is a walled in dirt yard with a few electric saws and planers under a lean-to. Nice guy who speaks good English. Today he walked around to tell us the table was ready but he couldn't varnish in his yard due to the dust so he came to varnish it in the house today. He then hired a couple of guys with a wooden cart to bring the table around to us. It is about a mile away on dirt roads.
For water we are fortunate to have a water tank on the roof. A few days a week a line gets turned on to let water flow to the house. Jacob installed a little booster pump to lift the water up to the tank. We can’t see how full the tank is, so for the first time we got up on the roof and saw how full the tank was and then measured the flow rate from the pump using a std bucket and then calculating how long it would take to fill the remaining part of the tank. We left it to run a little too long I guess and the tank over flowed on to the flat roof and started to run off the roof out through over flow pipes. Ramona had a bucket outside trying to catch the water and then other woman saw what the muzungu mama was doing so they all bought buckets too to catch as much water as they could. It is so precious they can’t waste any of it. One little boy scooped the water out of a little hole in the dirt and put it in a bucket.