LIFE BY LOUIS: Piped water is officially a pipe dream in this city

Leafy Suburbs is now officially a water-stressed residential area. ILLUSTRATION| IGAH

What you need to know:

  • We only showered on Sundays before going to church.
  • On the other days, we just cleaned our faces and feet and jumped into bed.

I’m no stranger to water shortages as this was the norm growing up. As you know, mine was a school that can only be describe as befitting a polling station and not a presidential debate. Having piped water in the school was indeed a pipe dream.

We only showered on Sundays before going to church. On the other days, we just cleaned our faces and feet and jumped into bed.

NO SPARE SET OF SCHOOL UNIFORM

We didn’t have the luxury of a spare set of school uniform that we could change into in the middle of the week as we cleaned the other set.

As a result, we appeared in school looking like squirrels that had just taken a break from burrowing holes.

The teachers would sometimes taunt us by inquiring if our bodies were made of salt that would dissolve if we were touched by water.

Although the precious fluid flowed freely in the rivers and it rained every season, access to flowing water for domestic use was a nightmare.

This is the only problem from the village that seems to have followed me into the city after I cleverly dodged picking tea, shearing sheep and milking the cows.

Water shortage, or water stress as people who work with big NGOs call it, is not a problem that is willing to let me have peace in the city yet.

It is a live subject in the leafy suburbs where I survive with other like-minded Kenyans who have to persevere through a myriad of other problems every day.

DIRECT INTERACTION

Our Estate Security Consultant also known as the security guard has always been that quiet gentleman.

My only direct interaction with him is when I check in at midnight after helping to push volumes of adult beverages in the estate outlet.

He opens the gate with a lot of nonchalance, only noting my time of entry so that he can later label me as a hotbed of suspicious nocturnal activities during the daily estate gossip briefings.

This was until water became a scarce commodity in the estate.  

He suddenly manifested himself as the person in charge of controlling the water distribution into our respective houses.

Each house has a small reserve tank in the penthouse where only he has unrestricted access.

Nowadays he walks importantly because each of the 85 housing units in the building is barely getting enough water and you have to negotiate your way into a spare jerry can. 

The guard knows the number of occupants per house, where there are school going children and which house needs more water because there is a newborn child.

He is ruthlessly using these demographic and situational facts to determine which unit gets how much water.

Woe unto you if you have the habit of checking in at 5am drunk and full of attitude.

You are assured that you are not going to have water flowing into your house for the next few months until the situation normalises or you mend your relationship with the guard.

For the house with a generous domestic secretary who has the habit of inviting the guard into their employers’ house during daytime and serving him eggs and bacon, this is payback time.

The house is guaranteed of full time water supply and they are even allowed to clean cars and wash carpets.

The situation in my house became dire last week so I headed out to his sentry after a few unbearable days of dry taps.

He has a thick black book where each house is allocated a page full of graphs and pie charts on water usage.

I politely told him house 76 is dry like my jokes. He pored over my page while biting his lower lip and gently scratching his beard with his fore finger.

I could see a lot of red key performance indicators on my page, with comments to the effect that I should reduce non key activities like washing muddy jogging shoes and boiling dry maize and beans.

After five minutes of keenly studying my consumption against the flow rate, plugging in the pumps pressure and considering frictional resistance of the pipes, he concluded that I must be misusing water.

“I put for you forty litres last week at normal flow rate and pressure, where did you take all that water?" he posed with the seriousness of fluid dynamics engineer with a specialty in hydrology.

"Two of my children are having a running stomach and therefore water is barely enough for my toilet," I lowered my voice and looked at him with utmost humility.

"Please put for me fifty more litres, I will be economical and I promise I won't bother you again" I pleaded.

He referred to his fluid mechanics data again before reluctantly heading off to the tank farm to open my tap.

As he passed my house he mumbled something to the effect that parents should stop feeding their children with uninspected quail meat and unripe mangoes that are causing running stomachs.

Leafy Suburbs is now officially a water-stressed residential area.