More water in the street

After all that rain, seems we missed the rivers in the street.  No matter.  Seems the water pipe outside my neighbor's house broke, again.  This happened about a year after I moved here and was fixed after a time, but for nearly a year after still looked like a construction site, with the sidewalk tiles piled to one side and an open sandy pit in the middle.  This time around resulted in gallons and gallons of water, just pouring into the street.  Visualize draining an Olympic swimming pool with a hose the diameter of your head.  The problem should be easy to fix, after all the pipes are only a few feet below the surface of the ground, but call after call to Embasa, the water company, got no answer - it was a Friday afternoon when it began to pour out water, after all. 

So Sunday afternoon, finally, after two days of who knows how much clean water is running down the street into the open sewer storm drain at the end of the road, some guys with a small bulldozer and a dump truck came out to dig a big hole and stop the flow.  This process took the better part of an afternoon, during which for some of the time, the workers just sat on the curb with their bare feet in the running water as it went down the gutter.  All that is left behind now is the pile of sidewalk squares, a lot of dirt, and a roughly covered hole. Lets see how many months the pile of tiles will remain untouched.  Doesn't matter I guess, after all, we all prefer to walk in the street. 

Morning Rituals

7 AM is a very busy time here in Salvador - people on their way to work, kids on their way to school, and delivery trucks are out in storm, leaving their goods where ever they are needed, often in the middle of major traffic routes.

Here, for example, is our coconut distribution service. Besides the local kids who collect them and sell them individually, there are companies that "harvest" the coconuts and bring them into the city in big trucks that may have "DISK côco" painted on them (DISK is what you call truck delivery; we have DISK banana, DISK sugar cane, DISK gas...). Unfortunately, as traffic was moving, you can just barely see there are two guys with large metal shopping carts, loading up coconuts to take to their stands which I assume must be somewhere nearby. This particular delivery was being made near a bus stop on Tancredo Neves Ave, one of the main veins (even shown on Googlemaps as a yellow road, so you know it's a serious route) of the city. Not that we would be concerned about traffic slowing....

Water doesn't grow on tress, but we have DISK water as well. This truck is loaded every day from the distribution center building, or maybe vice versa, I have never been sure. Nice clean water, coming out of nice blue bottles. Yet not more than 50 yards from this nice clean water waiting to arrive in your home, is a small river that is so full of garbage and sewage that you can barely walk past it without passing out from the fumes on a hot day. And, I might add, it is populated by dwellings of the lower class who must be immune to the smell by now. At least this DISK, on Orla - another major route to everywhere, parks on the sidewalk instead of in the road...