Do-It-Yourself Utilities, Part One

There aren't any public utilities offered in our area, so we provide our own. We use solar panels for electricity.  Mine  provides enough power for lights, my computer, cell phone charging, a fan, etc. I still get a kick out of the fact that I don't have to pay an electric bill each month!

My solar panel

We get our water from the village well, which is capped and the water is brought up via a hand pump. My colleagues and I pay local women to bring us jerry cans of water from the well. My jerry cans (which are plastic, not metal) are yellow and can be seen under the counter in the picture below.

I fill the large black barrel on the floor on the right with water from the jerry cans. Then I use a pitcher to fill my water filter, which is on the counter just to the left of the barrel in the picture. I use the water from the filter for drinking, cooking and for brushing my teeth.

I also put water from the barrel into the blue pail next to the filter.  It has a spigot and I use it like a tap to do various things, most important of which is to wash my hands.  The gray pail on the stool below the filter and the hand wash bucket is like a sink which collects the run-off water.

The two gray basins are for doing the dishes. I fill them with water from the black barrel. The darker, shorter one is where I wash the dishes and the other one is for rinsing. Then the dishes go in the violet dish drainer, which, by the way, I inherited from a former C4C team member who had (and maybe still has!) a penchant for purple. (I also inherited my purple table and chairs from her---good thing I like purple, too!)

More utilities details to follow in a future post.