No water, too much water and our new apartment.

So we’ve been hearing a lot about the extremely dry spring that Colorado has been experiencing. And well, we don’t have that problem here in Bucay. We’ve been here for a month and half and it’s pretty much rained every night and sometimes in the day.  A week ago we moved into our new apartment just down the street from where we were living. We are very excited about our new apartment. It’s quite clean and nice. The little old lady who owns the building recently had it built. Basically all the houses or buildings here are set up with rebar and/or columns sticking out the roof so that when you want to add another floor you just add it on. So our apartment was built on half of the roof of our building so we are able to walk out onto a big terrace that’s bigger than our apartment. We share this space with the other apartments. People use it to dry their clothes. We’re on the fourth floor so we have nice views of the mountains when they’re not covered by clouds(which seems to be most of the time). And yes, we have to walk up three flights of stairs to get to our place.

                We found this place when we were here for our site visit back in early March. We were walking down the street and a little old lady asked us where we were living and if we needed a place to live. So we got to see it then and she basically held it for us while she continued to have work done on it. She had rented to a Peace Corps volunteer in the past so I think that helped us out.

                Now here’s where the fun begins… We’d visited the apartment several times before we moved in and we noticed that sometimes there was water and sometimes there wasn’t. We’d ask her about it and she’d say that she’d get it fixed or something like that. So we moved in a week ago knowing that there still was some problems with the water. For a few days we still showered back at our host families’ place.  We kept leaving our landlord notes asking her to do something about it. We’d fill buckets and tubs when we had water so we’d have it for washing dishes, bucket bathing and laundry.

                The first night we slept there it rained in the night (which is normal) but I also heard additional water hitting the roof. I get up to discover water in our main room which is leaking thru the ceiling just inside the door. We had been warned about water coming into the apartment but we thought it came from under the front door when it rained really hard. Well, come to find out it does that too. So I mopped up everything, put buckets down to catch the water and went back to sleep.  In the morning I began to investigate the problem. Right outside our door on the roof is a big blue cistern. We were told this would be our water or we shared this with another apartment. I conclude that this thing must be leaking which is causing our problem. I stack up two saw horses so I can climb up to check it out. I pull the lid off the tank and it’s empty.

To make a long story short, days go by of talking to neighbors, leaving notes with the landlord and trying to figure out the system. Then the neighbor below us tells us that there’s something very important regarding the functioning of the pump for our cistern in his apartment. We ask if we can see it. We go into his bedroom and coming in through his window is the electrical plug for the pump. (?) So he saysjust go buy some electrical cord so we can splice it in and run the cord up to our apartment. My response is, “Si, si, si!” So I buy the cord, he splices it in, I run it into our kitchen window, plug it in and just like that I’m filling the tank. I’m so pleased with myself that I send Cherith a text telling her that I think I solved our problem.  After it filled I was able to take a shower for the first time in our apartment! I send Cherith another text with the news of my shower.

Now if you’re paying attention this story started with water coming into the apartment (probably from the cistern).But I took great care to replace the hose clamp on the hose going into the cistern and I inspected the whole thing when it was full and it wasn’t leaking. So why then when Cherith returns several hours later was the tank empty? I was stumped.

The next day our host family sends over a guy who was doing work on one of their toiles to take a look at our problem…a plumber…of sorts. He looks things over and starts working on the water lines coming into the house down by the street. I was very skeptical of this approach but I didn’t interfere. He ended up installing  a one-way valve so that water won’t drain out of tank back into the water coming from the city. I’m very confused. It’s like we have water coming from the street and we have water from our cistern feeding into the same system.Whatever the situation,the water stops draining out of the tank.

That night we hear water hitting the roof again and it’s not raining. So we’re up in the middle of the night, standing  on a saw horse and shining a flashlight on the cistern. Water is overtopping the tank and running onto the roof (and the pump isn’t plugged in). In hopes of preventing the water from saturating the roof again and coming through the ceiling we turn on the kitchen sink and the shower. We’ve did that for like three nights. It’s such a waste. I conclude that at night, when no one is using water, the system is pressurized enough to fill our tank through the water outlet. So we get the plumber guy to come back and install another one-way valve on the water coming out of the tank so that water can’t back up into it.  And Viola! We now have the ability to fill our water tank, maintain the water in it and it doesn´t overflow at night. We are finally able to sleep through the night without have to deal with this issue in some way.

I´m sure we´ll find more problems with our apartment but for now we´re happy.

These pics are just to give you an idea of what our place looks like.

Obviously this is before we moved in...