Water, Water, Everywhere

Water, Water, Everywhere is the name of a well-known swimsuit store in the States.  Although, I do not recall ever buying anything from the store, I did always think the store name was pretty catchy. Unfortunately, in Africa, "water, water, everywhere" has come to mean something totally different-a more literal term. 

A few days ago I was awakened by Paul at 4:30am. My first thought in my unconscious state was, "Oh no, Paul's sick," as that is normally why he would wake me up at that time. However, that was not the case this time. Paul had gotten up to use the bathroom and had stepped down into about an inch of water. I quickly turned on the lamp beside my bed and noticed that there was water covering our entire floor--I was not a happy camper! I ran to our bathroom to look for the problem, but everything was dry. We didn't have any water though-guess that's what happens when all of it is on your floors! There were several items on the floors that got drenched-clothes, suitcases, a pillow, some books...but the only item that was completely ruined was Paul's i-pod. No fun!

We scoped out our house to try to see where all the water had flooded in from...only to find that our hallway and Micah's room was also completely drenched. We quickly snuck into Micah's room and turned his fan off since the cord was lying in water. He woke up for a few minutes, but thankfully went back to sleep.

 It took us awhile to figure out where the water was coming from, but we finally figured out it was from our guest bathroom. We have had water issues off and on for awhile now, and they seemed to have gotten worse in the past week. There has been several mornings where we have not had any water at all and we have had a constant leak in our guest bathroom. Lets just say the plumber has been a frequent visitor lately. 

Paul and I spent the next hour and a half attempting to clean up the flood in our room. I mopped and mopped and mopped...while Paul took a wet a towel and squeezed it into our shower over and over. Even though the floor was still pretty wet, at about 6am we decided to go to sleep and finish in the "morning" as I knew once Micah was up I would be too. :)

We woke up at around 7:30 and finished the job in our room. Thankfully, our house helper, Josephine, arrived in time to help attack Micah's room-we needed the help! Some other friends arrived to help too, and the rest of the day was spent trying to fix the problem. We thought the problem was fixed, but then it all happened again at 6:30pm. I was getting ready to put Micah down for the night and whooooooshhhhhhhh-here came another flood. We tried to stop it, but couldn't and we once again had to clean up about an inch deep of water. Some other friends came over and fixed us dinner and held Micah while Paul and I conquered the disaster. We were exhausted by the end of the evening. 

Since then there has been a few days where we have once again had no water at all. My patience is about gone after last week...I am hoping the problems are truly "fixed" once and for all :) 

It is hard to see, but this is our bedroom floor covered in H2O 
This is the evil place where the "leak" started...
Attempting to mop up our bedroom at 5am
I filled up about 6 of these just from the water on our bedroom floor-not to mention the millions of towels that Paul squeezed out!

This is round 2 where we attempted to stop the water with the towels...but it didn't work!

Paul cleaning up Micah's room so he could get to bed!