A world without water

Today’s lecture is on things we take for granted.

This morning when I woke up we had no water. Admittedly my immediate thought was something along the lines of “Oh God, something’s broken and we haven’t handed it over yet……” but it turned out to be a much simpler explanation – there wasn’t anything in the tank because we’d used it all.

Everything here is either made on site or delivered by lorry (with the exception of the Internet which comes via a huge satellite dish on top of one of the “duck and covers” (duck and covers are upside down, reinforced concrete “U” shapes where you go and hide in the event of incoming fire). Water is delivered by the tanker load, 10’s of thousands of litres a day – and remember there are less than a 100 of us here at the moment.

Electricity is made here by these two huge generators (they switch over periodically so that they do not run all the time.) They have a huge fuel tank for which diesel is delivered on a regular basis. We haven’t been without electricity here yet but I have been in the middle of a power cut at the COB at about 5.30pm when all the power just goes off. As a rule you’re working on laptops or the desktops have UPS (uninterrupted power supplies - back-up battery things that allow you to at least save your work.) The upshot was that everyone just said “Oh, that’s that for a while” packed up and wandered off. (the generators will have sunshades shortly but they are late being made and delivered - it will be a good excuse for another picture at some point !)

We rely so much on our power here, not just for running our computers but our air-conditioning, which is a God send (or so we imagine, I guess we would just have got used to the heat and made the most of nature before it was invented), we need it for our communications because I haven’t had a mobile signal for 3 weeks (a friend of mine tells me on Facebook that she hasn’t had a signal on Vodaphone for 2 days and she’s pulling her hair out……) – so you adapt. My typing has certainly improved, and video calls to the family are fun. God know’s, we would have survived 20 years ago, before mobiles and computers, although I would have liked to see the post office operating from here !

Sewage is collected from a huge storage tank by tanker and taken away and disposed of (I would like to think that is isn’t just taken out into the desert and dumped but it wouldn’t be the first time……)

The food, much the same as everywhere else I guess, is delivered every day and cooked here on site in the kitchen. I don’t know all of the quantities but I do know that my guard force get through 100 cases of bottled water every 5 days (and there are 39 of them).

Anyway, back to the water. It turned out that because the water tank is on the inside of the big wall and it’s filled up from the outside, and the Camp Manager’s office is also on the inside of the wall, he couldn’t see that the tanker that had turned up yesterday was smaller than the tankers that had been delivering previously. This coupled with the usual language problems revolving around rural Iraqi drivers and grumpy Geordie Camp Managers meant that the Camp Manager, wrongly as it happens, concluded that because the lorry was empty therefore the tank must be full. Still, everyone just gets on with it knowing that the best we can do is get the next delivery early (we had no water till just before lunch), and that there’s no point in jumping up and down because it won’t make an ounce of difference.

Here endeth today’s lesson.

Today’s inventory:

3 cigars – It was only 2 yesterday I discovered when I went to get one this morning so technically I am cutting down !

0 units

0 Dollars

Gym – nothing again today. My tummy is still behaving like the big dipper at Alton Towers so I have concentrated on not doing anything to further upset it today, staying out of the sun and feeling better – which I sort of do but another good nights sleep won’t hurt I’m sure.

Weather – same old same old

Food – despite my internal problems, today I really enjoy roast chicken, chips and peas for my lunch. There was something very normal about it – which was nice. I’m looking forward to going back to the COB on Sunday night because we never seem to have noodles here and I miss noodles !

That’s about it for today. There does always seem to be something crop up to base a theme on for the day but if there are any special requests then please feel free to make my life easier !