Water Woes

You can't drink the water in Indonesia. In fact, sometimes it even discolors clothing, according to my maid. So, our company provides hot/cold water dispensers just as they do in Nigeria. But here, we have to buy the water ourselves (along with a whole lot of other stuff that they provided in Nigeria but don't provide here). But, that's not a problem about the water -- the price is very low.

So, because the company doesn't tell us much, it took awhile to find out how we should best buy bottled water. As it turns out, we can buy it from the compound maintenance office (along with purchases of gas for the 3 gas tanks we have for the 3 hot water tanks). Denny, the compound manager, is a great guy who is very helpful and even speaks some English. He's been able to answer almost all of my questions as they arise. So I bought one bottle from him to see how we did in consumption. Over the weekend we ran out of water. But we had a few small bottles of water so I wasn't too worried.

Monday came around and I sent our maid, Lusy, to buy a replacement bottle of water and she came back empty handed -- "No bottles, Missus." I thought, "Welllllllll, it's Monday. I'm sure they'll get a delivery later today."

To make a longgggggg story short -- 3 days later we still didn't have water. Now I was getting concerned -- and thirsty! I tried to communicate to the maintenance office that if they weren't going to get their water supplier -- Aqua, appropriately named! -- to deliver more water then I needed to know where to get some. Denny said that the other companies' water bottles don't fit our dispenser.

On the verge of tears, I came back to the house and asked Lusy what we should do. She suggested that we send a driver (which we don't have, yet) out to find Aqua.

Just then, the really, really inept gal from the company who is in charge of our housing (and is a part of the team that is the major source of stress for everyone on the compound) arrived (unannounced) at my door to do inventory (on the pathetic furniture she took a week to slowly provide as we continued to ask for each piece over and over again!!! She switched out the better furniture that had been in the house and gave us junk. Some of the stuff is so low to the ground that it's hillarious to watch Jim try to sit in it! The better stuff wasn't that much [better!] ... so I'm not whining too much. We'll be bringing some things in our shipments and buying some of the famous Indonesian teak furniture!)

Anyway, while she was standing there, I said, "By the way, we've been out of drinking water since Sunday and PMC office doesn't have any. Where can we get Aqua?" Her answer --- "Oh, there's no Aqua in all of Balikpapan." My response -- "Is there a reason that you couldn't tell all of us that information since you work for Personnel and your personnel need water?" No answer ... just a smile (the southeast Asian way!) ... "So what do you suggest we do?" No answer ... more smiles.

Just then my hero, Jim, arrived! With half a case of small bottles of water!

So, after this woman (who can make people's blood pressure rise, instantly) left our house ... I made myself of cup of tea by boiling the water Jim had brought home.

Sitting down in my newly purchased antique teak rocking chair, I sighed, smiled, and sipped my tea. And then ran to the sink to spit it out.

Careful examination of the Bahasa Indonesian on the water bottles indicated that, indeed, it was what it tasted like -- salty water and, therefore, salty tea. We now have half a case of some sort of highly ionized water -- good for you but not so good for tea, I think!

It was all so pathetic that we just had to laugh. And laugh we did!!!

Thankfully, I can report that we now have two bottles of Aqua -- one in the dispenser and one on standby! And I'm going to be researching the benefits of ionized water ...