Water
I just finished a book called "Re-Inventing Order In the Congo." It was about how the people of Kinshasa get along with an infra-structure meant to support 25% of the people who actually live here. As such the book should have been called "How the Kinois Do It" or something like that. But it is a collection of essays written by professors and a plain spoken title would not have been grand enough. They used words like "historicity" too.
Turgid prose aside, the book was filled with interesting things. One of the essays dealt with how 6 million people live off a water system designed to supply about 1 million people. In low lying areas they dig wells in the yard and line them with sections of 200 litre fuel drums. Out by the hills they use water from springs. All sorts of clever things.
One 0f those clever things I saw at out hanger, or rather, outside our hanger. The water comes from a city water point about 50 metres from the hanger. We ran a line from there to the building. One day one of our guys, for some reason, walked the line from the hanger to the water point and discovered a fish pond along the way. "Where did that come from?"
The people who live on the airport, mostly Air Force families, had cut our line and used the water to fill up the pond. Then they put the other end of our line into the pond. We still get our water from the city water point, but via the pond. I wondered why our water is kind of brown once it settles out.
The pond is used to provide a ready source of water for all the little gardens in that vicinity of the airport. The fish just happened to show up. Don't ask me how. They are little tiny fish. Many of them live in the drainage channel on our street too. Perhaps they get sucked up by thunderstorm updrafts and rain down. Who knows.
I read about those gardens in "Re-Inventing Order In the Congo" too. You see these gardens all over Kinshasa, each about 5 metres square. They occupy, almost literally, every square metre of unoccupied land; tree lawns, empty lots, the spaces between hangers etc. The produce is critically important in providing affordable food for the people of the city. Things that used to be brought into Kinshasa via road aren't anymore because the roads are all wrecked. So the people grow their own.
By digging the pond, the garden growers get a ready source of water without hardly affecting our access. Clever ain't it. We won't consider the bill.
Turgid prose aside, the book was filled with interesting things. One of the essays dealt with how 6 million people live off a water system designed to supply about 1 million people. In low lying areas they dig wells in the yard and line them with sections of 200 litre fuel drums. Out by the hills they use water from springs. All sorts of clever things.
One 0f those clever things I saw at out hanger, or rather, outside our hanger. The water comes from a city water point about 50 metres from the hanger. We ran a line from there to the building. One day one of our guys, for some reason, walked the line from the hanger to the water point and discovered a fish pond along the way. "Where did that come from?"
The people who live on the airport, mostly Air Force families, had cut our line and used the water to fill up the pond. Then they put the other end of our line into the pond. We still get our water from the city water point, but via the pond. I wondered why our water is kind of brown once it settles out.
The pond is used to provide a ready source of water for all the little gardens in that vicinity of the airport. The fish just happened to show up. Don't ask me how. They are little tiny fish. Many of them live in the drainage channel on our street too. Perhaps they get sucked up by thunderstorm updrafts and rain down. Who knows.
I read about those gardens in "Re-Inventing Order In the Congo" too. You see these gardens all over Kinshasa, each about 5 metres square. They occupy, almost literally, every square metre of unoccupied land; tree lawns, empty lots, the spaces between hangers etc. The produce is critically important in providing affordable food for the people of the city. Things that used to be brought into Kinshasa via road aren't anymore because the roads are all wrecked. So the people grow their own.
By digging the pond, the garden growers get a ready source of water without hardly affecting our access. Clever ain't it. We won't consider the bill.
posted by Carl at 3:46 AM
1 Comments:
The picture of the pond might be some time in coming. I don't want to get arrested again.
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