Water Days

One of the big differences between life in the UK and life here in Tanzania is water. Here in Mpanda, not only do we need to filter our water before drinking it but we also have to keep on top of our own water supplies. The mains water only comes on three times a week for just a couple of hours at a time so it's important to be ready to get enough of that water into suitable storage containers for us to use until the next time it comes on. We do have a water tank and an electric pump, which hypothetically means we should be able to simply switch the pump on when the city water is on and it will magically fill our tank.

Our tank and pump 

The tank is in turn plumbed into our house so we can turn on the pump whenever we want water to come out of our taps/showers/toilet cisterns (we have yet to decide whether to leave it on all day - those electric pumps are pretty noisy!). Unfortunately, it turns out that our pump is just a tad too far from the mains water pipe, and the mains water pressure is too low, for the water to reach the pump in order to get pumped into the tank. This means that until the fundi bomba (plumber) can work out a solution, we only get city water to our outside tap so every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday we have to take all our buckets out to the tap, turn it on and wait for the happy gurgle of city water to come on (this could be any time between 12 and 5pm, which can present a slight problem if I'm feeding Theo when it comes on and Olly is at the office...) then keep an eye on it, changing buckets and carrying water inside to fill up the big water butts we keep in our bathrooms etc...

Water day

It's a bit of a faff but it's worth it to have enough water! It was a bit stressful at first when we weren't really sure how much water we would need to get us through until the next water day, but now we've been doing it a while it's not too bad unless the city water comes on while I'm feeding Theo and Olly is at the office or if it doesn't come on for long enough to fill all the buckets - that happened once and we did run out! Fortunately we were able to pay to have 80 litres of water brought to our house and transferred to our buckets - we think it must have come from a well or something because it was much cleaner than our usual water! Mostly we are thankful that we have access to mains water at all and can afford it - not everyone here can say the same!