The 24-hour drought
2009-06-05 11:09
Once, when I was a teenager, two friends and I sat out a blackout in the one friend's bedroom. We lit candles and chatted, and it was actually a rather pleasant evening.
Every so often, one of us would come up with a suggestion like, "please put a bit of music on" or "let's make some toast", before we remembered that we weren't sitting around in candlelight by choice.
I can understand how babies are frequently conceived during blackouts.
In recent years, we South Africans have all become very used to managing in the dark. If you make a point of enjoying it (as long as you're not on life support), you can actually come to relish the nights of darkness.
I have one friend who has even started to do Thursday nights without lights. She and her husband cook on a fire, eat by candlelight and just take an evening out to enjoy the quiet.
So, electricity, although essential to our modern lives, is easy enough to live without if you put your mind to it. The absence of water, on the other hand, is not so easy to survive, even just for a day.
I live in Orange Grove, and for the last 24 hours, we have been without water. To make matters worse, I have a seven-week-old baby in the house. I am not one of those people who thinks that having produced offspring makes me superior to the rest of the population (although there are times...), but not having water has made things particularly difficult for us.
For one thing, you need to wash your hands quite a lot when handling an infant. I'm not a neurotic, terrified-of-germs, run-for-the-soap-every-seven-seconds kind of mother, but when you spend your days breast feeding and mucking about in someone else's effluent, it's kind of nice to be able to clean up afterwards.
Add to this the need to shower, to flush the loo and most important of all, to drink water, and it's been a terrifically inconvenient 24 hours.
I'm not a South Africa doomsayer. I try to be positive about this country, and I do believe that everything is going to work out OK in the end. But 24 hours without water, without warning, does bring to mind images of a Zimbabwean future where we all drive around in Land Rovers trading hippo meat.
- Georgina Guedes is a freelance journalist. She can hear the water gurgling in the pipes as it is restored.
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