No Water!

Friday June 18, 2010

Day 4, no water. I am actually considering going out into the pouring rain to shower. Any thoughts or experience with this course of action. It’s really only bearable for three reasons: 1) The landlord provides me with a small barrel each afternoon for cooking and toilet flushing, 2) Rhonda (a play therapist volunteer here this week) is in good spirits about it too and 3) the electricity has been relatively reliable these days, only going out twice. There is really nothing that can be done but laugh. The lack of water is not the true problem, after all I can only start smelling Ethiopian rather than “bad”; the issue is there is no measurable way to determine when it will come back on. It could be next hour, tomorrow, or in two months. And I am assured that, unlike in the US, no one is really working that hard to fix this predicament.

Despite all this I had a major breakthrough with some of the older kids at Foster. I literally had an adrenaline rush, which is a good thing for me because I’m sort of a junkie. As I was casually reading “Goodnight Moon,” as I do every day, one of the girls connected the “cow jumping over the moon” to the sound cow make; then more associated “two little kittens” with the sound of a cat. They have known their “barnyard” animal noises for weeks now, however always in the context of the story, “Moo, Baa, La La La,” which explicitly teaches what animals say. This connection between books really shows that they are comprehending rather than just memorizing, which it totally the next step. A big success!