I took a break from writing over the past week because I've had to deal with recurrent flooding. The day I started the blog, I thought I'd seen the worst of it and would write about it in detail. Well, it turns out that the dyke was just beginning to leak at that point. My work week consisted of 5 days of water coming either out of the ground or down from the ceiling. In summary it looked like this:
Monday - my daughter had a shower and we went downstairs to find the laundry and kitchen flooded. My older daughter Lamide jumped in with the expertise learnt from being a veteran of multiple floods of her dormitory room in high school, and we cleaned up. The maintenance man found no source for the water. Later, water began to drip from overhead while my son was taking a shower in his bathroom. We mistakenly assumed this to be the source of the flooding and were told the problem would be fixed the next day. And while at it, one set of shelves in the pantry collapsed while trying to move things stored under the dripping water.
Tuesday - the workmen came in and fixed both the ceiling leak and the faulty shelf before I came downstairs. Things were looking good until Lamide took her shower and we noticed water on the floor again, and this time we caught it bubbling up in the laundry from the drain in the floor in front of the washing machine. As we were cleaning up the water in the kitchen we began to notice a nasty odour and then looked towards the drain...yep, you guessed it, everyone's worst nightmare - sewage coming up from the floor drain! I had already called for maintenance but the speed with which I jumped up to call again amazed even me. I screamed that it was an emergency and we needed the maintenance guys now. Within a few minutes a man came, and he opened the drain and cleaned it. He then announced "Nyet problem (no problem)" to which I vehemently disagreed. I had to call reception and have the receptionist act as a translator - have you ever tried to explain with faux sign language the severity of a problem to someone who believes there isn't one, when you can't understand each other? Not fun in the least! Eventually the maintenance and regional managers, who thankfully spoke English, came around and inspected the problem. Next thing I knew there was a team of 6 or 8 workmen trooping in and out of my house in dirty boots, opening the sewers outside (pheew!) and breaking down the walls to reach the pipes. Construction materials and multiple unmentionables were found in the drains. At the end of the day, I was told the problem was fixed.
Wednesday - no water seemed to be rising from the ground, and a female artisan came to plaster the wall after the panel was replaced. However, we noticed a stain forming on the ceiling in the living room soon after my son took his shower, on the other side of the house from the laundry / pantry which had previously leaked from the ceiling. One of the managers came to take a look and we were told someone would deal with it the next day.
Thursday - a relatively chatty plumber who appeared to have only 2 teeth left in his mouth came to fix the leak in the ceiling, telling us it was "Italiana problem" - apparently Italian contractors had worked on the house. Before he left, the washing machine began to leak too! He tightened whatever was loose in the hoses behind and declared that to also be "Italiana problem"! He asked if we were from Cameroon, then "Niheriya (Nigeria)", the first regular Kazakh I'd met who didn't think we were Americans. Apparently for most of them the only blacks they see are black Americans in movies, so by default we're American, especially when they hear our accents. We often correct them and let them know we're from Canada, which most of them have heard of.
That evening, just as we were beginning to heave a sigh of relief, Lamide went to take a shower - and up came the water from the floor drain again! Talk about feeling frustrated - was it never going to end?
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Welcome to Atyrau
I've just spent the day cleaning up backed-up sewage in my laundry, threatening to spill into my kitchen....so the adventure begins in Atyrau, Kazakhstan.
Having played with the idea of writing a blog for a couple of years now, I never expected the above sentence to be my opening line. I had initially planned to write when I moved back to Nigeria from Canada, but I never got round to it. I promised myself I would do it this time since I was moving again, to a country that would probably never have come up on my "Top 100 Countries To Move To" list. The experiences leading up to our departure, and during our trip over, could themselves fill a book. But back to our little plumbing mishap for now.
We (my three children and myself) arrived in Atyrau two days ago. My husband moved here last fall, and we came to visit for a few days over Christmas. As soon as the school year ended for everyone, we headed here. From the air it was a very different sight from what we'd seen in December - an expanse of brown prairie-like land, with not a land elevation in site. My son Biodun commented that it reminded him of flying into Calgary (Canada), where we'd previously lived for several years, but without the patchwork of farmlands that are characteristic there. The pilot announced as we were about to land that the temperature was 34 degrees C on ground - apparently it'd been 37 degrees earlier that day! As soon as you stepped through the door of the plane it hit you like a brick wall - dry heat like being in a huge oven. Air conditioning has never felt so good!
My husband had moved to a new townhouse complex a couple of months ago, and proudly informed us that he'd used the showers in all the bathrooms except one (there are four altogether). So we naively didn't expect any unpleasant surprises when we started using the showers the next day. My youngest daughter, Sayo, who's six, as usual was the first of us new arrivals to wake up after their dad had gone to work. She came to ask me to help her with the shower. Because the shower bases were flat and not fully enclosed, she'd been forbidden from using her previously assigned shower after making a watery mess the night before. After taking her shower in her brother's bathroom, which had a bathtub, she wanted breakfast so I went downstairs with her...and walked into a flooded mess! The floor of the walk-through pantry / laundry was covered with water on the laundry side, and had spilled over into the kitchen. This did not look good.
Having played with the idea of writing a blog for a couple of years now, I never expected the above sentence to be my opening line. I had initially planned to write when I moved back to Nigeria from Canada, but I never got round to it. I promised myself I would do it this time since I was moving again, to a country that would probably never have come up on my "Top 100 Countries To Move To" list. The experiences leading up to our departure, and during our trip over, could themselves fill a book. But back to our little plumbing mishap for now.
We (my three children and myself) arrived in Atyrau two days ago. My husband moved here last fall, and we came to visit for a few days over Christmas. As soon as the school year ended for everyone, we headed here. From the air it was a very different sight from what we'd seen in December - an expanse of brown prairie-like land, with not a land elevation in site. My son Biodun commented that it reminded him of flying into Calgary (Canada), where we'd previously lived for several years, but without the patchwork of farmlands that are characteristic there. The pilot announced as we were about to land that the temperature was 34 degrees C on ground - apparently it'd been 37 degrees earlier that day! As soon as you stepped through the door of the plane it hit you like a brick wall - dry heat like being in a huge oven. Air conditioning has never felt so good!
My husband had moved to a new townhouse complex a couple of months ago, and proudly informed us that he'd used the showers in all the bathrooms except one (there are four altogether). So we naively didn't expect any unpleasant surprises when we started using the showers the next day. My youngest daughter, Sayo, who's six, as usual was the first of us new arrivals to wake up after their dad had gone to work. She came to ask me to help her with the shower. Because the shower bases were flat and not fully enclosed, she'd been forbidden from using her previously assigned shower after making a watery mess the night before. After taking her shower in her brother's bathroom, which had a bathtub, she wanted breakfast so I went downstairs with her...and walked into a flooded mess! The floor of the walk-through pantry / laundry was covered with water on the laundry side, and had spilled over into the kitchen. This did not look good.
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