Water (and not a drop fit to drink)

Dushanbe, Tajikistan - Water seems to be always a problem in this city. It still flows freely from the taps but it is not fit to drink, or on some days it is not even fit to wash in. There are rumours this week of an outbreak of typhoid in the city as the weather is warming. The infrastructure of the city is decaying from neglect and poor design. The sewer pipes in many areas leak badly and as part of that poor design they were often laid in the same trenches as the water pipes - above them in some areas. The water pipes have decayed through old age and untreated corrosive water being pumped through and thus raw sewage is leaking into the water. To compound this there is no primary treatment and the silt, sticks, stones, leaves and other debris is sucked into the system from the river that supplies the city. When the snows melt high up in the mountains or there is a heavy rain the water coming out the taps becomes thick with mud. This picture was taken the other day in the bathroom of my apartment. On this particular day I couldn't bring myself to have a shower - instead it was a sponge bath with bottled water. This reminded me of what I wrote last year when I was here during a time when the water was shut down to the whole city for a week. I rumaged around in my files and found it:

You gotta love the water here – If it’s not muddy water coming out the tap then it’s even thicker mud. It is disgusting. In most countries a mud bath is a luxury that you pay big bucks for. Guess I’ve had a lifetime supply.

I’m probably going to wear this picture out but here it is again – trying to run a bath. I was without water for almost 1 week last month. Seems when the city water was finally restored on the 5th day all the mud & assorted other goodies that was in the water supply lines plugged the smaller diameter pipes to many buildings including our apartment building - - so here’s a building with 54 apartments and the pipes are plugged. A private work crew finally arrived on the evening of the 6th day without water & that’s only because one of the tenants in the building is very important (not me – that’s for sure). They had a large water truck with a compressor. The theory is that you hook this rig up to the pipes in the building and create more pressure on our side of the obstruction than the city water side has and you blow all the crap back into the larger diameter city mains. (It gets back into the system and plugs another pipe somewhere else) That’s the theory anyway. The risk is that they will blowup the pipes on our side before the obstruction clears.

We now have water and the landlord is running around trying to get all the crap out of the taps in my apartment so they will work. He has to disassemble each tap and clean it, plus disassemble the water line to the toilet.

In anticipation of another day without water I went on a hunt for bottled water earlier that day to flush the toilet and have a sponge bath. Guess what I discovered. All the local water is sold out – it’s the cheapest. The imported water – it’s from Georgia!! Is more expensive than a bottle of locally made vodka!!!! 1.5 L Water is equal to $1.45 USD while the 1.5L Vodka is $1.38 USD. So for a laugh - - Guess what I bought to flush the toilet with??

Now the water is restored and I have all this vodka to get rid of - - - - . Trust me drinking the stuff is not an option, as rocket fuel would probably taste better.

Well now that I had all this vodka I found a use for it on laundry day. I came back to the apartment to see the woman who does the laundry washing my white shirts in what you see in the famous picture. The shirts had distinct reddish – mud tint to them. Once again we couldn’t communicate as my Tajik is non-existent, and my Russian only rudimentary enough to ask where the washroom is and a few other basics (believe me you have to know how to ask for the washroom) we couldn’t connect. So I showed her by example.

I dumped the rinse water from the tub & grabbed a couple of vodka bottles. I dumped them in and rinsed. Once again – wow - did the vodka ever get dirty. Pulled the shirts out & used some expensive drinking water as a final rinse to lessen the alcohol smell. I handed them to her and she hung them up to dry. When I came home that evening my jeans and socks were also washed. There was another bottle of vodka empty and the apartment stunk of alcohol. This has to be the whitest my shirts have been in a long time.