Running Water....All Over the Place!!

I must confess that I have been a big whiner about the lack of running water. Everything has been going really good here in Haiti with one small exception. We have to pull water out of the cistern in order to get water most of the time. Occasionally the pump will turn on (usually late at night) if the city power turns on. Sometimes this will last 20 minutes or maybe if we're lucky an hour or two. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to "when" we will get this sporadic electricity. BUT...this has worked out ok (even though I whine a little bit). When we hear the pump turn on, we then go around the house and flush toilets. We also fill up some buckets of water for the next day.

Last night, we heard the pump turn on. Yeah!! We knew that meant we would have water for a brief period of time. Then we heard water running. Sometimes it is difficult to tell though what sounds are coming from inside the house and what is from outside. We thought it must be raining. Then one of the kids started calling us from upstairs saying there's water. hmmm.....yep...we had water.

There was water all over the place! It was running out of the sink and onto the floor. One of the girls slid across the tile floor in a big puddle of water. At that point, she grabbed the sink to keep from falling and pulled the whole sink out of the wall. Water was spraying everywhere. It was down the hallway and into the girls' bedrooms before we knew what was happening. David was able to get the pump shut off without turning off the rest of the power. Praise God!


But....we now have a problem. We no longer even have sporadic running water because our water now has to be shut off entirely. There is no way to stop the water from running if it does turn on due to the way the sink pulled off the wall and broke the pipe. There doesn't seem to be a shut off valve at all for the house.

I have learned one small thing in Haiti. EVERYTHING is a process. Something where in the states we would simply run up to The Home Depot and buy an inexpensive part is a big ordeal in Haiti. Access to just about anything is challenging and incredibly expensive. Logistics of going to get a part (if you can even find it) can be a day long process if you are lucky. But...thankfully no one was hurt and we were able to sweep out all of the water. I wondered when we moved in here why there was a door upstairs that goes out to literally nothing. It's just a door without a balcony or anything. I now realize what that door is for. It must be to sweep various things outside of the house. Generally I think this must be either a some sort of a flood or possibly an infestation of various kinds of bugs!