Apparently my landlady was aware, because my pots were strategically placed all over the floor to catch the dripping water. My landlady came over the next day and we spoke. She doesn't understand Ukrainian--certainly doesn't understand my Ukranian--, so we have to converse in Russian. I'm struggling to keep up with her, but while I want to know when the water issue is going to be fixed, she's getting on my case about not telling her that I was going to be gone for so long. I tried to explain I didn't know I was supposed to tell her, but by then she had moved to tell me my apartment was a mess (a Ukranian landlady can demand you keep a clean apartment).
On most other days she would be correct: my apartment is usually a mess. Ironically, I had cleaned it before leaving. What I had not cleaned was my dining room, where I do lesson planning, which looked as if a hurricane had hit into a newstand, papers spread everywhere. Not wanting to upset my ingenious organizational system, it was the one room in the apartment that had been left as is. She also took issue with the level of dust. As I hadn't spent more than a few days in the apartment since June, I thought the reason was obvious: I simply hadn't been home long enough to do it. The water question unanswered, she took the month's rent and left.
I called my Ukrainian coordinator and asked her to place a call to my landlady to make sure the rain situation corrected. My coordinator called back: the leak will be fixed in a day, but why is your apartment dirty? Clean it.
It was life as usual for a few days, although no one came over to fix the leak. The light fixture in the kitchen had understanably stopped working under the onslaught of the water pooling above my ceiling, and so I have an image for you: me cooking dinner by candlelight in an indoor rainstorm.
Rainstorm became a better metaphor. The leak was just getting worse and the rain coming down harder. A large crack had opened the length of the ceiling, one wall to the other, a row of buckets, tubs and pots following it, the splashes caught by potato sacks given to me by a kind neighbor (who immedietly started beseeching God upon seeing my kitchen and then demanded that I call my landlady again).
I recieved an email from my Peace Corps Regional Manager: he had called my coordinator to touch base for the upcoming school year. She gave him the news of the past few days. Two lines of the email were about the water, and two paragraphs were about the cleanliness of my apartment: "understand that not keeping the apartment in a decent condition is not only a health hazard," he wrote "but also it may damage both your relationships with the landlady (and the site) and your image of a PC volunteer." By this time, the dining room had been cleaned (took, oh, ten minutes to put all the papers in a stack) and the apartment had been dusted. I emailed him back to reassure him I was not living in squalor.
I took my neighbor's advice and called my landlady. Later that day, her husband came over. I like him. For some reason, my landlady is completely unable to understand my accent and this leads to many frustrating conversations. Her husband, though, never fails to understand what I am saying and speaks in such a measured, slow pace that we're able to easily converse. I pointed out the worsening situation in the kitchen. The water, steadily dripping down the cabinets, had begun taking the old paint with it and the floor was covered in pots, water splatters and white paint chips. He looked at it for a few minutes, then made a few phone calls.
Twenty minutes later, as I was walking downstairs, a man came upstairs. In one hand was a wrench, in the other a flashlight, I felt I knew where this was going. When I returned later, my landlord and the man were gone, and so was the water. They had simply shut my water off.
There are 3 liter bottles all over my apartment for water, in addition to a huge 20 gallon drum. Because my water is shut off every night, I had kept these full. But as I became better at understanding how much water I used each evening (and because mosquitos had been breeding in the drum, leaving their larve), only two 3 liter bottles were now full. I was without water for God knows how long.
I stretched the 6 liters for three full days. I had never realized how much I used running water until it is gone: how much is used for cooking, grooming, washing the dishes, bathing, flushing the toilet, even just quickly washing off your hands because they're dirty. Once again, I thought about the Peace Corps Africa Volunteers.
In any case, the last of my water gone, I cleaned the apartment again and locked it behind me. I was going to East Ukraine for a week to visit friends and discuss upcoming projects. I hoped I'd have water when I got back.