Living on a mountain, I never would have though I would need to worry about floods. However, life has a funny way of dealing out the unexpected. One day, coming back from the Secondary School, I thought, “A nice, refreshing shower will be nice when I get home.” Ten minutes later, hot and sweaty, I arrived home. But upon opening the door, I was welcomed not by a shower, but a bath. The entire entry was flooded with water and the damage continued on to the other rooms. A good inch of water stood in the entryway, hallway, both bedrooms and the bathroom had closer to two inches. From the outside of the house, you could see the water coming out of the bathroom outside wall. I quickly surveyed the damage. Nothing seemed too bad – a few wet pairs of shoes and a wet laundry basket. I grabbed a broom and began the slow and difficult task of sweeping the water out of the house. The problem with water is its fluidity. When you sweep the water in one direction it has a tendency to fan out and end up where you didn’t want it. You learn to sweep fast enough to keep the water somewhat together but slow enough to be able to beat the water to the end of the hallway where you have to change it’s direction to keep get the water out of the house instead of into the kitchen. No, it wasn’t the rains that had flooded our house, but our hot water heater. The heater, little more than a rusty tin can, had started to leak after I left in the morning and had nearly flooded the house by the time I had returned home in the afternoon. Since that incident, we have been forced to take cold showers and keep a bucket of water under the heater to catch the drips. We have been informed that a new heater will be installed soon, but ‘soon’ on a Tanzanian timescale is tantamount to ‘eventually’. At least we will be conserving more water and energy this way.