"Give Your Plumber a Hug"

Our lives are full of people who touch our lives in indirect yet important ways. Your plumber is one of these people. Do you wash your hands? Flush a toilet? Take a shower? Wash your clothes? These may seem like only little moments, but they can become pretty slippery operations that soil your day. 

At first, I treated the moments when my sink or shower flooded my bathroom as character building opportunities. That lasted about two weeks with the added side effect of me showing less. I had never really given plumbing that much thought before. At home it’s all hidden in walls or floors and works pretty well, well enough for me not to think about it. However, stepping out of your shower wet and naked onto what was a dry floor but is now a puddle water coming from a rather unappealing hole in the floor which bugs have crawled from on more than one occasion makes you think about the business of plumbing pretty quickly (cue mouth-breathing escape to the bedroom). In short, plumbing is much more visible here, but more as an after-thought. 

As I try to adjust to living in a different part of the world this has honestly been one of the biggest puzzles for me. My school is a good example. The toilets and sinks are motion activated but the pipes are not fitted properly and often leak onto the floor which leaves me scratching my head. I keep thinking I’m missing something, some part of where this makes sense on some cultural level and that could help me dismiss my concerns as childish first-world complaints. The bizarre truth seems that to be that people here really just don’t care. It’s not a cultural issue, it’s just simply not an issue at all. I still don’t get it. I did however get duct tape and did some DIY plumbing of my own. So count your lucky stars if you have a good plumber and give him/her a hug next time you see them.

Metal + hose + rust = : (

DIY handiwork.

Drain in community bathroom.

Getting my feet wet.