kumvera: it was almost like the village

Update.

48 hours, and still no water.

The story is that the bill has been paid. (I didn't believe it, until I saw the receipt.) Now we're just waiting for ZESCO, the utilities company to come back and reconnect the pump.

My friend Nsangwa - who just lives 2 doors down from me - took us to another friend's place to fill up our buckets.

It was almost like going to get water in the village, except instead of walking to the borehole, we drove. and instead of enjoying the process, i was too busy scheming how to make sure the building managers felt some pain of this whole situation and enforce some accountability. We could make them come down and carry our buckets up for us. We could publicly shame them by putting posters up on the wall. We could go in and use whatever water they had saved up from their flat.

In the end of course, I ended up appreciating that I wasn't pumping my water from a borehole, or gathering it from a stream every day. And that this was more of an inconvenience than it was a way of life.

It was just fun to think about how to introduce better accountability mechanisms into this system and how you could leverage the social pressure from 16 flats to change the way things operated. And it was also somewhat fun to consider that instead of working on a report, or working on a proposal, or coaching someone on my team, I spent 2 hours needing to fetch water; funny, there isn't a management book on managing time wisely that takes these things into account.

Anyway, I didn't scheme and I'm all hot air when it comes to making the building management feel the pain of our inconvenience. I ended carrying my own water back up to the flat, all 18 L of it.

Oh, yes, all 18L. I thought i had 40L saved up, but I had less than half. Interesting how when you have less resource, you adjust.

As in, i'm adjusting to the dirtiness of my kitchen. I have pretty much used up every single pot, pan, and plate i own. Twice. Ok. maybe three times. ok ok, maybe four times?