A few days ago we had a practice of patience when we woke up to an empty water tank. Perhaps a little background info will help you understand how this is even possible. Every house that I’ve seen so far in La Vega, and most of the DR for that matter, has a multi-gallon tank on the roof. Most of them are black, and there are different sizes and shapes, but they all do about the same thing. They hold all of the water for a given house. Each house also has an electronic pump with an automatic switch, which pumps the water from the big pipe under the street to the tank that is on the roof. It’s really not that complicated, but there are plenty of ways that things can go wrong. A broken PVC pipe, a pump that’s not functioning, or a lack of electricity are just some of the problematic options.
At first we thought the lady that takes care of the plants left the water on in the garden. It took a day to figure out there was no way that could happen because the garden hose isn’t hooked up to the tank. Then it took a day to figure out that even though we had closed all the outdoor spigots, the tank still wasn’t getting water. On day three the chairman of the board for SCS showed up with a couple of guys from his church to help fix the problem. Mind you, that was two days of walking down to the garden to draw a bucket of water just to flush the toilet. Fun times.
With relative ease they figured out that the automatic switch on the pump wasn’t telling the pump that it was time to draw water. A quick trip to the hardware store and about US$5 and we were back in business.
I think we weathered the whole thing with good grace. Kisha and I remained on the same team as we tried to trouble shoot and network to solve the problem. We are now much more appreciative of water when we turn the spigot off and on. So I guess you could say that we practiced the patience pretty well!
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