I watched Warren closely, fascinated. He took several careful steps intently watching the mostly full water bottle balanced on his left hand. It toppled and he caught it in his right hand. He turned around, retraced his steps back behind the wall and repeated the procedure. He scuffed a mark in the dry lawn with his boot and walked off at 90 degrees then walked back over the spot. The bottle fell again. He was divining for water in our garden.
I am no believer in witchcraft but Warren backs up his dousing with some science and he’d successfully sited a borehole for me at my work, just out of town, so we’d got him in to our garden to see if he could repeat the success.
A couple of months ago one of the two boreholes that my nursery relies on, started to give problems. It has been fine for the 22 years that I have been there so I was more than a bit concerned. I knew it was a water problem because the run-dry electronic protection system kept tripping. I responded by reducing the flow of the water to a measly 1,300 litres an hour. It can run for a day but at night the security guards, who are hopefully not sleeping, report that the ammeter on the switchboard by my office keeps dropping to zero indicating the pump has turned off.
The area where my work is situated is not great for ground water and there are no streams nearby. I rent the property and the landlords sank five boreholes to around 70m each when the land was bought in the early 1980s. One is useless and I have to share the other four with the other occupants who include another nursery, a rose nursery and a small domestic property. The prospects for new siting of holes are limited. Nevertheless, Gill, my landlady agreed to finance a new hole but I would have to pay for the siting and equipment (the latter would remain mine to take with me if or when I leave). Several water diviners, or dousers as they are sometimes known, were contacted and brought in. There was no agreement on where the water may lie. Only one, Warren, used a scientific backup (a machine based on electromagnetism) to what his water bottle told him and both indicated a likely source, so we called in the borehole drilling company that he recommends.
Payment was made up front and withing a couple of days they had arrived. Watching boreholes being drilled can be a stressful experience but I wasn’t paying and it was the first one I’d seen up close. The drilling mechanism is mounted on one large truck, about seven tonnes, and the compressor that powers it is on another. There is a lot of noise and dust.
Each pipe section that makes up the drilling column is six metres in length and mounted eight to a rotating carousel. It didn’t take long to drill to the 60 m that Warren had advised and water was found at 38m, almost exactly where the chart above indicates. It was not exactly a gusher at an estimated 1,000 litres per hour.
The actual process took only three hours as 60m is not a deep hole by today’s standards. In fact the hole at our house in the suburbs only has a 40m hole which was probably standard for the 1970s and quite adequate at the time when boreholes were unusual and municipal water flowed in the pipes. It never recovered from last season’s poor rainfall and now will only pump for an hour or less before emptying. One of the other diviners who came to my work was quite garrulous and told me he’d recently found and drilled (he had his own rig, or so he said) a “gusher” at 200m. It’s the first time I’ve heard of such a deep hole in the urban areas but 100m is pretty much the norm.
The foreman for the drilling company handed over the drilling report which clearly stated that the hole was an “excellent yielder”‘ and suitable for extracting water. I was surprised that 1,000 litres per hour was considered an “excellent” yielder and gave the drilling company a call. The manager explained that for a domestic hole, which is mostly what the company does, a 1,000 litres per hour was considered good but they did tend to be conservative in order not to disappoint customers and that we should get on and use it as it could take a season of pumping for a hole to unblock all the cracks and reach its full potential. It has taken a few weeks to get all the ditches dug for the pipes and the switchgear put in a box that is reasonably theft-proof, so it will all be turned on in the next couple of days and the moment of truth will be realized.
Meanwhile Warren has submitted his report on the site he found in our garden and is reasonably positive that it’s a good site. All dousers make a point of saying on their report that it’s not an exact science and a good result is not guaranteed. Warren has more faith in his bottle than the electronics and admits that he doesn’t really know how the latter works. He keeps up to date with technology and recently contacted a European company that was advertising a machine for divining. Even at a cool 150,000 euros it was not guaranteed to find water. There just doesn’t seem to be the tech out there to find water accurately.
I asked the same drilling company for a quote to drill to 100m. They came back with US$4,100 which included the casing but not anything else. It’s not a small sum of money but if we find water it will substantially add to the value of the property and will take two years to cover the cost of the water we are now buying in for domestic purposes. We do occasionally get municipal water but it’s not reliable and goes into the swimming pool and then is pumped onto the garden to keep selected areas alive through the dry season. We certainly wouldn’t entertain drinking it as it comes from the heavily polluted Lake Chivero into which much of Harare’s storm water, industrial waste and sewage drains. The human excrement side of the pollution can be dealt with but not the industrial. Well, not in Zimbabwe where the water treatment works frequently runs out of cash to buy the aluminium sulphate used to settle the particles suspended in the water.
The suburb of Harare in which we live is known as Mount Pleasant. There is no “mount” of which I’m aware and the area is not known for a profusion of ground water. However the road along which I drive to work has some verdant verges that are profusely watered, so some properties do have good water. I’ve named it Irrigation Alley and it’s not unusual to see upwards of eight sprinklers (yes I did count them) watering the verges and the road. In fact this morning there were 14 working along a 1.3km stretch of road.
Marianne is on several neighbourhood WhatsApp groups that discuss these sort of things and appeals to irrigators of verges and roads to conserve water so the rest of us with marginal boreholes, or none at all, don’t have to buy so much water. Their response is “it’s my water and I’ll do as I like with it”. That’s technically true as all of us with boreholes pay an annual licence fee that allows unrestricted usage. Community spirit in this respect is in short supply.
After much dithering we have decided to go ahead with the borehole in the garden. The money has been paid and the drillers have made an inspection and think that the site is a good one. They will be back in due course and I’m not sure if I will stay around to watch. Of course it will make not a jot of difference if I do watch but there’s a lot riding on this.
At work we finished the electrics on the new borehole today and tomorrow we should be able to get the pumping gear down the hole and see if we have something useful or not. No doubt the irrigators of Irrigation Alley will be watering the road and the verges as normal.
Zimbabwe Absurdity 
Old dogs are special
18 11 2022On Tuesday Marianne asked me if I’d remembered it was my birthday today. I had totally forgotten about it. I won’t but that down to old age just yet but my memory isn’t great and I’ll explain that later.
I got to thinking last night that I was about to turn 63 which is 3 times 21 and what was I doing at 21 and 42? Oddly enough I have quite clear memories of my 21st.
I was in the car park at my university residence when and acquaintance by the nickname of Russian, who was actually of Polish descent, found out and asked me if I’d been kissed yet (he didn’t have to specify a woman). I made some non-committal reply whereupon his girlfriend, Colleen, stepped up and kissed me. It probably was my first kiss! Being a November baby meant that parties clashed with exams so my mother paid for a few of us to go out for dinner later in the year.
November is, of course, an historic month. Armistice Day marking the end of the First World War is on the 11th. This year I noticed a plethora of Facebook posts marking the occasion and reminding readers how we must no forget. I agree totally. Less well known in the wider world is that the Rhodesian government, led by one Ian Douglas Smith (who was a World War 2 fighter pilot in the RAF), made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from British rule on the 11th of November 1965 making Southern Rhodesia just Rhodesia which became Zimbabwe in 1980. International sanctions swiftly followed and we were on our own (with support from South Africa and Portugal) until 1980. Rhodesians were capable and highly industrious and for a while the country flourished.
Various Facebook sites on the 11th were swamped with ex-Rhodesians reminding me of this. They seem to have forgotten that by the end of the ensuing bush war in December 1979 we had long lost the support of Portugal and South Africa and came very close to a battle for the capital city, Salisbury (now Harare) which would have been a bloodbath. The following elections got us Robert Mugabe as a ruthless head-of-state and we all know how that eventually turned out. Thousands of people lost their lives in the bush war, my father included as an innocent civlilian, and I was partially paralysed in a military action. Really, did those who concocted the UDI not see the train wreck coming? What were they thinking? The UDI was arguably the worst decision in our history.
What was I doing 21 years ago? In 2001 the Mugabe regime was on the rampage, chasing white commercial farmers off their land, frequently destructively. Often farms were looted and abandoned of their agriculture, plunging the currency into a hyper-inflationary period that culminated in 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar notes and inflation in October 2008 estimated at 4.3 million percent. Those who could left the country, New Zealand was particularly quick to see the potential of qualified Zimbabweans and welcomed them en masse. I do know that in 2001 I had a lot more disposable cash than I do know and I did around that time have a party for friends in a local restaurant. It was great fun. Maybe we just didn’t care about the impending financial disaster or more likely we just chose to ignore it for the night. I certainly wasn’t concerned about getting to 63 – that was far away.
Now 63 is here and I’m not impressed. But before I go down the route of losses and gains I owe an explanation of my terrible short-term memory. In April this year I had a lower back operation to repair and stabilize various vertebrae that had deteriorated as a consequence of the bullet that tore through that region in April 1979 (detailed description in Reflections on the first half). The operation was successful and the surgeon said the spine was not as messy as he was expecting but the anaesthetic has had lasting consequences on my memory. It even has a name; Post Operative Cognitive Dysfunction (POCD). While its occurrence in people my age is uncommon I appear to have been unlucky – I’ve had more than a few general anaesthetics in my life and none have had this effect. Effects range from forgetting conversations I’ve just had to full-blown bouts where I cannot control my thought processes and I cannot perceive the world around me. The POCD may last in younger people up to 6 months but in older people there can be permanent effects. Recently I decided to do something about this and give my brain some work to do.
When I first took over my business I quickly vowed to get rid of the pile of paper that accumulated on my desk at the end of each month and decided to write my own software package to deal with the administration side of the business. I duly went on a course to learn Visual Basic (VB) and got to work. It took several years but it does the job now. While these projects are never finished I more recently decided to write a wages package that my senior foreman could use and free me up from tedious and mistake ridden Excel spreadsheets. It works well but being written in an old version of VB has issues running on my relatively new laptop. So I rewrote it in a newer, and quite different version. On getting out of hospital I needed something to do whilst on bed rest so wrote a cash notes calculator for the old version. Being rather pleased with they way it worked I decided to write one in the new version, only to find to my complete amazement (and disquiet) that I’d already done it before going into hospital. I had zero recollection of writing the app or the code itself. So now I’m rewriting the original accounting software to give my brain exercise. It will be a long project.
My mobility has taken a considerable knock over the years. At university I used to cycle all around the campus and when I left I went on a cycle tour of France, Switzerland and Germany. At 42 I still cycled around the farm where I rented a cottage. This all came to an end, albeit slowly, when a South African surgeon did a less than stellar job of fixing the neck I’d fractured as a teen. Back in 2014, when I’d started tripping over my own feet, I winced mentally when the surgeon who finally fixed the mess said “Oh, that old man” when I told him who’d done the original surgery. Little did I know at the time there was a specialist orthopaedic spine unit which is part of the Vincent Pallotti Hospital in Cape Town. I have not been on a bicycle since. So the message to the reader is: if you really HAVE to go under the knife, DO YOUR HOMEWORK! When asking a local doctor for advice on who to see about the neck operation I accepted at face value what he told me. It was an expensive mistake.
So, in the last 21 years I have lost: hair (thanks to my mother’s genetics), mobility (already explained), hand and upper body strength also as part of the aforementioned, hearing (thanks to the military) for which I wear hearing aids – I love ’em and can enjoy music again and of course my eyesight is not what it used to be. I do wear bifocal glasses but only for flying a drone. I’ve had lifelong short sight for which I’ve variously worn glasses, then I had a flirtation with contact lenses and now I’m back to glasses which I take off for close work.
Gains: toys, rather a lot! Some years ago when it became apparent that paragliding was a dying sport in Zimbabwe I took up aero-modelling. It’s definitely second prize but at least I get to fly something. So now I have several drones (I took the photograph at the top of the page with one) and some fixed-wing models too. I particularly like electric gliders. For the real flight experience I have a paramotor (that’s a paraglider with a petrol driven motor) but I don’t get to fly that much as I need assistance with the setting up. Of course I’ve gained a marvelous wife which was something I never expected to happen at 21 or even 42. Nothing could have been further from my mind at 21 and well, at 42 I thought I’d be a batchelor for the rest of my days. Fortunately I was wrong.
As for the next 21 years, well, it’s best not to think about it too much. Maybe I won’t get there, after all, 84 will be getting on a bit. Perhaps the end will come like the proverbial “thief in the night”, but sadly few of us will be that lucky.
I won’t pretend the last 21 years have passed quickly but I don’t have a lot of memories to look back on. I guess that it’s time to make a few now so next May Marianne and I are going with a group of friends to a rock concert in Birmingham, U.K. It’s our first ever and hopefully it will be good. Mike & The Mechanics are by no means a current band but we still like their music.
On Tuesday after Marianne reminded me it was my birthday on the 17th she went shopping. She complained that she couldn’t find me a present; I really wasn’t concerned – I think presents should be bought when one sees them, not necessarily for an occasion. It did occur to me to get myself a present, perhaps a rescue dog from one of the over-flowing charities. But I wouldn’t have been able to choose just one and would like to have gone for an older dog. Old dogs are special so maybe I’ll sponsor one instead.
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Tags: getting old, Rhodesia, Robert Mugabe, UDI, Zimbabwe
Categories : Blogroll, History, Social commentary