Lights out in Dakar

"Hmmm," I think to myself, sitting at the dining room table working on grades.  "The descriptions are good but he forgot some dates.  Let's see, that's a....."

Darkness abruptly descends.

":One," I think.  "Two, three."  I should be thinking in French but I'm kinda' annoyed.  This happens like every night.  "Four, Five, Six."

"RRrrrrrrrrr," the generator tries to start but fails.

I sit in the dark, waiting and wondering.  This is the first time the generator hasn't started right up.

I start counting again.  "One, Two..."

"RRrrrrrr.  VrooommmmMMMMMMMMM!!!!!" The generator kicks in, the lights flair on and I go back to work, knowing many people in Dakar are now in the dark, listening to the sound of our generator and seeing the bright lights in our house.  Maybe this is why we have a guard?

So very often the power goes out.  They tell me that as the weather cools, it won't happen as often but the leaves are starting to turn colors in New England and Mom has already driven south for the winter.

Oh, and the city has no water.  Again.  We had no water for 3 days last weekend.  Then, it went out again yesterday.  They had enough water at school to get through the school day but if there's no water by tomorrow, there won't be any school.  We have some water in a cistern on the roof which lets us flush the toilets and clean the dishes but that will only last for a few days.

Well, as they say, TIA.  This is Africa.

Some pictures of Dakar- from Julienne

This is our street.

This is our house.

Getting in the car.

Basket sellers.

At the grocery store.

Sidewalk vendors:  fruit, cellphone minutes, etc.

The gas station.

Outside of the city:  waiting for the cows to cross the road.

Playing at the rocky beach.

Outside the city:  playing with kids while visiting the family home of our day guard, Fallou.

Waterless in Dakar

We arrived in school on Friday to find that the drinking fountains weren't putting out much water.  We went on with the day just fine though the toilets began to get stinky.

We woke up Saturday to find there was still no water.  The week before, we had started getting a water service for drinking water.  Not only is the water that is shipped form Canada (!) almost sweet it's so good compared the heavily chlorinated and filtered water at the school, but it means we started the water outage with 10 gallons of drinking water.

Also on Saturday, I skampered up on our roof.  All around Dakar, there are black water tanks on the roofs.  Did we have a black water tank?  Well, I climbed up and found that indeed, we do!  I also discovered that along with a pipe to fill the tank, about 150 gallons of water, we also seem to be missing a way for the water to get back out.  There is an outlet pipe but this house recently had a lot of plumbing work done and it seems the out flow pipe was abandon.  Sigh.

We woke up Sunday morning to smelly bathrooms, water on the stairs and rain.  When it rains, the caulking on the windows has dried up so water pools on the window sills then comes in instead of going out.  But, the rain was a chance to get water without trying to scamper up on the wet roof.

So, we collected about 3 gallons of rain water, washed the dishes and flushed the toilets with water to spare.  Now the big question - school tomorrow or not?  When will the water come on?  And, once the water comes on, when will it reach us?

All of the nicer houses in Dakar have their own water storage next to their own pump.  The water from the city comes as a trickle and sometimes is off for hours at a time, but with the large reservoirs and our own pump, we don't notice it.  Our house has a storage tank with about an 80 gallon capacity (not counting the unusable roof tank.)  But, with many houses having these large storage tanks, once the water is turned on, these tanks will start to fill.  Since there are about a million (!) people in between us and the main pipe coming from the north of the country, it might take a while for water to get to us.

So, another day without water in Dakar.  I'm going out back now to take a bucket shower.

Postcards

After our trip to Thies, Skylar was inspired to make some pop up cards.  Video the postcards below!

Postcard from France

Postcard from Senegal