The Story of the Water Pump

Last month (yes, I know I'm behind in posting) one of our weeks was dominated with the adventure of fixing our water pump. The story goes something like this....

Here, many homes have a well, a water storage tank on top of a tower, and a pump to transfer water from the well to the storage tank. I assume they do it this way because the electricity (which runs the pump) is so unstable. This way the pump can run when the electricity is on, and the house can be supplied with water even when the electricity is off. Well, the automatic switch that tells our pump when it's time to refill the tank quit working.

During the process of getting it fixed:
 - Jonathan suffered a wasp sting (or several) when he climbed the tower to investigate, after which he sprayed the rest of the wasps to death.
 - Jonathan made a total of 3 trips to various hardware stores before he was able to buy a replacement part, learning in the process that hardware stores here close before 5 p.m. and do not open until 10 a.m.
 - We were without water for about 6 hours on 2 different days.

Um, yeah, this is a pretty high tower. I couldn't watch Jonathan come back down.

 The day after Jonathan triumphantly conquered the water pump, I was surprised and dismayed when the water went off AGAIN (while J was at school, of course). After my meager attempts to get the pump running, our landlord came over and checked things out for me. He kindly informed me that the water to our house had been shut off by...ahem...Toby, who was playing outside. How embarrassing! Toby had helped Jonathan once by turning the water pipe off and on; apparently, he remembered how to do that.

Fortunately, now that the pump has been fixed, it is working better than ever and we've had no more waterless afternoons. =)