When Dario arrived on the second day, he and George positioned the
additional long ladder, and then they climbed down inside the well once more. If
either of them fell, he would be badly hurt. I worried about George flailing
about, scrubbing on such a long ladder. Dario was used to it, but George was
not. George wasn’t worried
as his newly strengthened body gave him confidence he could manage. I crossed my fingers and tried not to dwell on it.
They
scrubbed for four hours straight, then Dario left for his usual two hour lunch,
and when George came upstairs, I asked him how it was going. He said it was not pleasant work and it
was slower than we had hoped. Since the well was large and the residue was
stubborn, we would have to cope with no water for a little while longer. As per the local custom, after lunch George slept for an hour, and I woke him when I heard Dario driving up the hill. Fed and rested, they descended back into the well in mid-afternoon and returned to the surface around seven o’clock, sweaty and
dirty.
On Wednesday morning when I woke up the children, all
four of them had wet their beds. I tried not to exclaim too loudly, but the
sight of all those wet and stinky clothes was too much. They had just soaked
the last of the clean pajamas and the last of the clean sheets. I had already planned to
recycle their day clothes, and I knew then that I would have to recycle those
urine-soaked night clothes. I took a deep breath to steady myself. Paul and
James looked ashamed, but it wasn’t their fault, neither the wet beds, nor the
dry well.
I thanked my lucky stars that Margaret Ann and Matthew had
toilet-trained themselves during the summer. It had been a competitive thing. Each
of them would try to outdo the other performing on the toilet. It was cute, but
drove me crazy for a couple of weeks, because I had to run back and forth to
the bathroom every few minutes, hoist them up, watch them squeeze out a few
drops, then all three of us cheer their efforts as I lifted them down. But at
that moment I was very grateful that I didn’t also have their stacks of dirty
diapers in the laundry.
I knew it was useless to urge the men to work faster.
They were already going as fast as they could. After working down inside the
warm, damp well, George wasn’t able to take a bath either, and the grime was
beginning to build up on him. He was as anxious as me to get the job
finished. I hung the children’s wet nightclothes and sheets on the line and
hoped that the ultra-violet rays from the sun would kill most of the germs.
There wasn’t much else I could do. I prepared breakfast, watched them eat it,
then I dampened a facecloth and wiped down the boys before I sent them off to
school. It was very hard to keep a positive attitude.
I think that day was close to my breaking point. I was
tired of looking at, and smelling, dirty children, dirty dishes, dirty toilets
and dirty laundry. I was dirty and sticky too. When Dario, George, and his
parents gathered at the well for the next descent, I asked them, pointlessly
and grumpily, why the local government couldn’t extend the municipal water up
the hill from the village to the farm. They said the demand wasn’t high enough.
Indeed, later that winter, when most of the gravel was washed away by the
rains, and the driving was treacherous on the steep, slippery road, Marino went
to the town of Cerrina and asked them to distribute more gravel. They told him
he would have to pay for it, as the road served too few people to justify the
expense. He paid up. Government offices all over the world seem indifferent to
personal problems, so when I asked about the considerable expense of running
pipes up miles of farmland, they must have thought me hopelessly naïve, but
they were too polite to say so.
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