Throwdown.
Chasing down our drinking water is getting old.
I was willing to forgive and forget last week when I had to call the embassy water coordinator to explain that we were down to a half bottle on the cooler and one spare after the truck had no-showed for 3 delivery dates. (And I was beyond relieved when the awesome General Services staff got us water that very same day.)
I was even willing to extend another pass when Friday came and went without a truck. After all, it was unlikely but still feasible that the delivery guys had cruised by and noticed that there were no empties on our porch to swap out.
But when yesterday came and went and there was still no truck by 6pm, I started to get angry. We had 2 full bottles in our storage room and a partial on our cooler so it wasn’t so much the fear of running out as it was the frustration of having to spend time and mental space on sorting our water situation yet again.
What really got my goat though? Today’s shenanigans.
Joe called me just before Nicolas’s mid-day nap to ask if the delivery guys were indeed, as they had told the water coordinator, knocking on our door in that very moment. I called B.S. immediately — there was no knocking on the door and neither the doorbell or the gate phone had rung. Still, I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt so I kept him on the line as I went outside to peek at the gate to our cul de sac. Just as I was about to walk back inside, the truck pulled up.
Nicolas on her hip, our nanny followed me outside as I carried our empties down the stairs to the waiting truck and explained, as best I could in my beginner’s Spanish, that the gate phone calls the house and that we had been home all day so there was absolutely no freaking way we could have missed it.
And that’s when I learned how fierce our nanny can be when needed.
Realizing that my (lack of) communication skills weren’t going to cut it, she jumped in with a line of rapid fire questions aimed at the delivery guys. “What days, exactly, are you supposed to be delivering?” “Where were you yesterday?” “How long were you knocking?” My Spanish may be rough but it didn’t take all that much to pick up what she was throwing down: she didn’t buy their story either.
¡Es mentira! she exclaimed as we walked back into the house. It’s a lie. “It’s bullshit,” I replied. Her quizzical look told me I’d have to translate and she gasped in half horror and half bemusement while covering Nicolas’s ears as I gave a literal translation that surely didn’t convey exactly what I was feeling.
Twenty minutes later, after the kiddo was down for his nap, I was still semi-seething.
“The problem is that I can’t express myself well enough here,” I tried to explain. “It’s that you don’t have patience?” she asked me. I conceded that was true, yes, but that it was more than that: I don’t have the words to put up a fight when I need to.
She told me it was more than just words I needed. That there’s a strength and straightforwardness that it takes to survive here.
But that if I wanted to, she was sure I’d learn.
