Lauranne is a work colleague who lives in Auckland, New Zealand. I don’t have too much contact with her, but from time to time we exchange emails, usually work related, with a few lines of personal information. She wrote and said it had become cold and rainy in Auckland as the the autumn gives way to winter. That set me off and I immediately replied, telling her of Cape Town’s water woes…here’s what I wrote. I guess one day this may be referred to as Cape Town’s ‘great drought of 2017’.
“Cape Town is in the grip of the worst drought that I have ever known and I have lived here since 1983. It’s terrible. We are supposed to, like Auckland, get rain this month. For Cape Town, it should be 14 days in the month. It’s the 11th and we’ve probably had 2 days of rain. The last good rain was the day before Good Friday (13-Apr-2017). There was a little last night, but the days generally are windless, dry and there is not much in the forecast either. They have instituted drastic water saving measures. You are not allowed to use drinking water for anything else like watering the garden or washing cars or windows or hosing down driveways. It can only be used for indoor domestic use. My husband, Mike was compelled at the start of summer last year (some divine inspiration) to put in two water tanks, which attached to the gutters fill up quickly as soon as any rain falls, so we have water for outside use. But we are putting in some chronic measures. Sailor showers, not longer than 2 minutes and catching water in a bucket when we turn the shower on as it warms up. Then we use that water to flush the loo. We do two loads of laundry a week. The problem is that even if we get sudden rushing downfalls that start filling the dams, they have go so low (22% with only 12% usable) that to recover from this is going to take a few years, so this is our lot in life for the foreseeable future. It’s only restricted to the Western Cape. Up country the dams are overflowing, so when I visit my brother in Johannesburg, I have a long, luxurious shower!”
This is what the dam levels looked like dated 8-May-2017
It will be interesting to look back on this in the years ahead.
With the rain falling last night and today being overcast, I decided soup would be a good idea. Right now, as I type, the aroma of it bubbling away on the stove is wafting up to my desk. I’ve set the timer for an hour, after which I will go down and blend it.
#289 of my 1000 thanks – a big pot of soup – the first of the season. 🙂
Julian arrives tonight for a few days, which is very fun. The weekends he is not here seem very quiet!
My Bible reading this morning left these 6 words lingering in my mind,
Proverbs 15:1
A gentle answer turns away wrath
These are the days!
Keep the smile going.
God bless you!
In His Grip,
Helga xx 🙂