Catherine's Chat

Many of you are in lockdown/isolation in your houses, thanks to the Coronavirus.

You probably put quite a lot of thought into sourcing food and creating new (perhaps not repeatable) dishes from the contents of your cupboards.  And we are no different here in Chad.

However one thing that you probably didn’t have to think too much about was water.  You have fresh, drinkable water coming out of the taps in your houses.  Here in Chad we don’t have running water in our house or in our yard.

We have to buy water from young men who push karts around selling it.  The price varies depending on the season of the year and the availability of water, but at the moment it is 1000CFA (£1.34) for a kart-full.

We store the water in large barrels. 

When we need more water, we phone one of the men to bring more.  Or we stand in the street and wave one down, but often they are already on their way to someone’s house.

For running water, most Chadians use a sakhkhan, or plastic teapot shaped container (pictured below).

We however choose to use a DIY tap system that Aphia made (pictured below).  Many of our storage barrels (and the washing hands station) are outside at the moment, so we have to be careful not to burn our hands when the water barrels have been standing in the sun.  We hope to make shelters for the water barrels soon!