Making the Best of Challenges

My time in the Dominican Republic has included quite a lot of time on finding "opportunities," or otherwise working on resolutions to problems that have arisen. One of the most recent challenges has been working through water supply issues to the house I'm living in.

It took about a week to find a staff house in San Juan for my project team, which included several days of looking for houses (low availability) and talking with landlords about the possibility of renting for only 3 months, but we finally found a nice house. It's in a nice neighborhood on the edge of town and is about a 15 minute walk into downtown San Juan. The house has a lot of space for the nine people we have living in the house on weekends, when all of the supervisors have come back from their community visits.

But after the first night of being in the house, we ran out of water.

Not that the water turned off temporarily, but that the water storage tank (fed by the city water supply) went dry. We had firefighters fill the water cistern the next day (Sunday) and thought our problems were over. And it happened again on Monday - dry. (Free water delivered by the municipality solved that problem).

After working with the ingenieros (engineers) on possible leaks within the cistern or other water pump equipment, we thought the problem was fixed. But the day after the project supervisors arrived (completing the D.R. Staff team), the cistern went dry again - and on a weekend.

Weekend + nine people = smelly people. Sunday is a rest day in the Dominican Republic, and most offices are closed (all stores close by 2 pm as well). We made an emergency pit stop at a hotel for some bathing Sunday afternoon.

Monday morning, I started working the phones to get an engineer, landlord, or someone from the water company to understand our problem. It didn't seem like it, but it paid off. Magically, overnight, the water cistern had filled up. A "key" had been turned off previously, preventing water from coming from the city into our house.

Lessons Learned: persistence, don't give up, creative solutions (hotel showers) and working the phones can help to solve problems.

We've now been 5 days without water issues!