A weekend without water

This last weekend was our first visit to the Brezovica house in nearly six weeks, only to find on arrival the water pipe to our house had frozen so no water. After considerable investigation it seems a neighbour of ours has done some rough landscaping around his house and lowered the ground levels resulting in the water pipe being nearer, too near, the surface and consequently frozen in a rock hard layer of permafrost. Well permanent that is until the spring thaw. So much for global warming. The weekend was hard work and made harder by the, not unusual, fact that we also had more or less no electricity all weekend (yet another power plant failure). Keeping a generator fueled, two wood stoves fired up and bringing water up by bucket from the river makes for a hard and rustic kind of existence. We couldn't drink the river water since it could be polluted so another neighbour, the only ones in residence that weekend, kindly filled some containers for us. On the Sunday morning they left to go back to Prishtina and when we called to refill the bottles we were disappointed to find them gone. Wondering from where we would be able to obtain water we then noticed three large plastic bottles of water left for us near the door. A simple act of thoughfulness that made world seem just a little kinder that day.

Independence up-date: it seems that next Monday, straight after the Serbian presidential elections the Kosova government will at least announce a date when they will declare independence. The waiting draws to a close.