Harare water: Tap sewage
I’ve just made some tea at the office. You know how it goes: open tap, fill kettle, boil kettle, pour water into teapot.
Except, with Harare water in crisis like it is across Zimbabwe, it usually isn’t that simple. Sometimes it’s open tap, find nothing coming out, close tap, grab jug. Sometimes it’s switch on pump, open tap, fill kettle, switch off pump. Incredibly, today, it’s open tap, fill kettle. I should have known it wouldn’t actually be that simple in reality.
But I’m standing there in the kitchen with the boiled kettle, and something does not smell right. If I’m honest, it smells like someone has left their poo in the rubbish bag by the window. But who wants to think that?! So I think maybe it’s the toilets at the service station over the road? Maybe it’s a rotting banana peel in the rubbish (I do loathe bananas)? It takes my colleague to point out: It’s the water.
I sniff, recoil, and sniff again. She’s right. The cup, the teapot, even the kettle now all smell like feces. Open the tap, fill another cup of water? A brown liquid in the glass, and an even stronger feces smell.
I suppose we should be grateful, right – Our office block most often doesn’t have tap water at all. But personally? I’d rather have nothing flowing from my taps than this sewage smell pervading everywhere.
The manager of our office block tells me it started around 10am – when City of Harare water finally came back to the taps. Apparently, the smell is a big infusion of chemicals, not the opposite, and it will just take a bit of time to work it’s way through the system. But since news reports suggests water chemicals in Harare are scarce, it’s hard not to be suspicious. They’re working on it, he tells me – It was even worse earlier in the day. Again, this implicit: “You should be grateful.”
But I don’t want to feel grateful that my office smells like sewage. I want to be able to open the tap, make a decent cup of tea, wash up afterwards, and not feel nauseated in the process.