June 26th 2010 - Hoarding

I think I have a better understanding of the concept of ‘hoarding’ things.

We just completed another 7 day round of no running water which means that our pila levels go down very quickly. So we conserve our water as much as we can. We know it will eventually run again so we don’t worry TOO much. But we hang on to our laundry and hope for running water tomorrow. We use less water to bathe; we cook things that won’t require lots of dish washing; the plants dry out (the ones not in the rain). Now logic would tell you that we should have some sort of water collection system from our roof during the rainy season. But no. Although I did plant that idea in the head of Balmore on Thursday – who said … yes… it could be done. All we would really need would be some sort of tube or PVC pipe fitted to our gutter leading down to our main pila.

So back to the hoarding concept: I often wondered about the ‘let’s go to Sam’s Club and stock up concept.’ The obvious is that it is cheaper to buy in bulk. And I admit I was guilty of it to some degree when I had children in the house. I did roll my eyes when I counted 42 rolls of paper towels in a friend’s garage storage shelf once …

Hoarding water. 7 days without running water. The sheets, towels and blankets from the last delegation couldn’t get done and have been sitting in piles. All our personal laundry has been piling up. (Good thing we hoard clothing!!)

This morning I woke up to a dripping sound from my bathroom! Hooray! We seem to have water. I quickly got up and turned the faucet on full blast to fill my pila and took my clean up in case the water got shut down early! Sometimes city water only runs an hour – but that is rare. It usually runs 4 or 5 hours every other morning.

Then I gathered up my clothes and went downstairs to ‘start a load’ (one at a time by hand with a soap ball and potato brush). It took over an hour. But I got all my clothes hung up on the lines in the back yard to start drying. But of course, it’s been raining all day so my clothes are getting a nice LONG final rain soft fresh rinsing!

So the faucet was open full blast in the large pila attached to the main house – this is where we do our laundry and dishes. And it was filling as I did my personal laundry and Cecilia washed the 13 or so blankets from the last delegation. We washed. It filled.

And when we took a break from laundry – and the pila was full … Cecilia got some big tubs out and filled them. And several big water jugs got filled. And a big barrel we have got filled. All the small buckets got filled.

And we are hoarding the water.
And it’s been raining buckets all day, too.

We should be good for a while.