Chapter 8. We Shift House
This house has been sold twice in the last two months.
(Jan’s letter home Jan 77)
It is now mid December and we are well settled in with quite good furniture, curtains, carpets, and so on. People know where we are and we have been able to do some entertaining. Nevertheless, a small cloud is appearing on our metaphysical horizon. We had a visit from a Libyan gentleman who said he had bought our Villa.
He said not to worry as we could still rent the place under the same conditions as before. He even asked us what we needed and when we said the second bathroom needed a good water heater, he said no problem it will be here tomorrow. In fact it arrived a few days later much to our surprise.
We installed it ourselves and were at last able to have decent showers, instead of having to use one of those hand-held things connected to the bath taps, which seems to be the norm in this part of the world.
I checked with our old landlord who said it was true and also not to worry, which only made me worry more. We had no idea what the new landlord intended doing. Nothing happened for a while except a man appeared and started doing a bit of gardening.
Then things started to get more serious, as the new owner started bringing people round to look at it. I eventually got to talk with him and gathered that he was selling it again.
This went on for some weeks, we couldn't help thinking that whoever bought it would probably want to live in it. This was all very upsetting and Jan and I decided to look for a new place, so if the worst came to the worst we would at least be prepared.
An English family we knew mentioned that the villa next door to them was vacant, and surprise, surprise, our original landlord owned it. I tackled him about it, and after a little haggling, he agreed we could have it at a slightly increased rental. He was in the process of re-decorating the inside and it would be ready in a few weeks.
The new house was in the Shebco area. This was marvelous, as the Shebco area was the one where all the expatriates wanted to live. It was an older well established part of Benghazi and most of the people living there had been there for some years.
Our house was one of a row of 4 that at one time (pre-revolution) belonged to Air France. Our neighbour on one side was an English family, and on the other dwelt a French family. A Libyan family lived over the back fence.
The road outside the Shebco villa.
The house was fairly typical of the area, three double bedrooms, two bathrooms, a large lounge, large kitchen living area, and an outside room with toilet for the Gaffer (watchman) that we used as a storeroom.
There was a patio and small lawn with numerous large trees. One tree was an enormous gum, which made us feel quite at home. There was a large date palm, which was a real pain, and a flame tree, which was beautiful.
The usual block wall surrounded the section with the usual iron gate on the street side. There was also a single car garage, and the road outside was SEALED. All in all, a big improvement on the old Villa, mainly due to its location.
The actual location was on a road that led to one of the outer suburbs, it was reasonably busy, and was an extension of the first of September street that itself was one of the main routes to town. We were also just off the main ring road and not far from the suicide corner shops. Really it was very convenient to everything.
The road outside our front gate widened into quite a large area of nothing much. Maybe it was going to be a square or something once but was never formed, it was just a large vacant block. Two things made it interesting, one was a sweet water tap, and the other was a water tower.
Sweet water was another name for well water and served to distinguish it from the city supply. It was available from standpipes, just a tap on a stake at a couple of locations in the whole Benghazi area. The standpipes were connected to individual wells and the water was quite drinkable.
Thoough I did hear that an analysis was done by one of the oil company chemists who found the sweet water had a higher bacterial count then the chlorinated city water.
Watering trucks collecting fresh water.
The sweet water taps were quite interesting in that there was usually a queue of people waiting to fill their plastic containers. These were mostly expatriates. In a queue of say twenty people, it would be quite possible to meet twenty different nationalities.
Whenever I was putting down a brew, I would take a couple of 20 litre plastic containers over and join the queue. Half an hour later I would lug the full containers back home. Usually the half hour went by quickly as everyone was friendly and liked to talk about their experiences.
Because everyone knew where the sweet water tap was, it was a very good reference point and made the explanation of where we lived quite easy.
"Where do we live? Come to Shebco and we are right opposite the sweet water tap, Air France Villa #2". That was usually enough.
The water tower was used to fill water trucks, which came and went most of the day. The good thing about this was that there was a permanent guard on duty, and I fondly hoped that he also watched over our Villa's.
Water.
I seem to be referring to water quite a lot but there is a very good reason, it is such an important part of daily living that without it living a normal life becomes pretty well impossible.
Water supply is taken for granted in most parts of the world. On the whole, this was the case in Benghazi also, but you had to understand the system to make best use of it. Our first villa was typical in its method of organising a regular supply of water to the household taps. It was a method that compensated for wildly fluctuating mains pressure, pressure that varied from zero to full supply.
Water from the street main came to a ground level tank via a control valve, this valve was operated by a float system and only closed when the tank was full. An electric pump associated with this tank pumped water up to a header tank on the roof, the header tank supplied steady pressure for the house. The pump was switched on and off by a float switch on the header tank.
When the header tank water level dropped to a predetermined value the pump switched on and topped it up to full. A simple enough concept, and it worked well as long as there was a reasonable amount of water in the bottom tank. All sorts of problems occurred if the bottom tank ran dry, not the least being the possibility of damaging the pump.
The incoming supply from the mains was the crucial factor, should this stop, it did not take long to empty the bottom tank. The problem was not knowing when the supply had stopped. It could stop at any time due to various factors, such as pipe lines being dug up by the drainage contractors, simple lack of water from the bores during the summer months, or more usually something completely inexplicable but probably caused by the city management. The only answer and what became a household routine was to frequently check the level of the bottom tank and regulate our water usage accordingly.
The latter part of summer was the worst time as this was when an overall water shortage occurred. Mains pressure could drop to nothing during the day and pick up slightly over night. It was a welcome sound to go out to the tank in the late evening and hear the trickle of water falling into the nearly empty tank. The flow was usually enough to fill the tank during the night and give us enough water for the following day.
We became quite good at water management, and when critical decisions had to be made it required keeping a close check on both tanks. I had a ladder permanently leaning against the roof by the top tank to make this task a little easier.
The water itself was not too bad, it was drinkable but not too pleasant to taste being slightly brackish and heavily chlorinated. It was a mixture of water taken from wells out by Benina airport and desalinated seawater from an oil fired power station.
We used the water for everyday use including drinking, if nothing better was available and suffered no ill effects. Some overly cautious expats would not even use it for cleaning their teeth, preferring to use the sweet water.
Electricity
I mentioned earlier in the chapter describing our first villa, about installing an electricity meter. Knowing a little more about the system, I arranged (through Omar) to have the meter transferred to our new villa. This was done without much trouble and I was pleased to have every thing organised only a day after we moved in.
As I mentioned the electricity supply to Libyan houses is 220 volts, it is a two-wire system, that is, there is no separate earth. This is okay as long as the wiring is of high quality and workmanship. Unfortunately this is far from the case and most installations required careful handling of electrical appliances and wiring. A couple of incidents brought this home to me quite forcibly.
The method of feeding mains to a house was standard in that 440-volt lines came down the street in a three-wire formation and 220 volts was tapped off from two of them. This means, 440 volts was available across one particular pair. This is normally not a problem, as the three wires are well separated on the poles.The wires running down our street were in very bad condition due to lack of maintenance, insulation was practically non-existent and the wires hung slackly from the poles.
One windy night I was wakened by an odd noise coming from the kitchen, I got up to investigate and switched on the lounge lights and was nearly blinded by their brilliance, then they all went out. I got a torch and went to the kitchen to be met by the refrigerator advancing towards me, it was making a terrible rattling noise and visibly vibrating, then it went still. I pulled every plug from every socket I could find and went back to bed wondering what was going on.
Next morning everything was normal except the fridge and our new transistor radio didn't work. Eventually I found out what had happened. The wind during the night had blown the street wires together, feeding 440 volts to our house, the fridge motor was running but under the stress of twice its normal operating voltage it was jumping around on its mountings enough to move the fridge across the floor. This was the noise I heard, but by the time I got to it, it was too late and the motor burned out.
The only other damage was the lounge lights and the radio's transformer. We weren't the only house affected, and enough people must have complained, as eventually the electricity department repaired the street wiring. Until then, though I kept a wary eye on things when the wind started to blow.
Another incident happened at work. For any airport to function properly it is necessary to connect together all the various sections so data, status signals, speech, etc can be sent backwards and forwards. This is done with multi-pair cables, these being terminated on cable blocks at each section.
In any well-ordered system, these cable blocks are listed in cable records so that an engineer or technician can identify each pair. There are hundreds of terminations, each being important in it's own way.
In my case the cable records had either been lost or were so out of date as to be virtually useless. To identify a cable pair I frequently resorted to the simple method of connecting a tone at one end then going to the distant end and checking each terminal pair with a pair of headphones till I heard the tone.
I was doing this one day, going down a 20 pair block checking each terminal pair when there was a flash and an almighty bang in my ears as the headphones disintegrated. I was pretty well deafened for the rest of the day, but did manage to find that some totally irresponsible person had wired 220 volts to that terminal pair as a convenient way to get power from one room to another.
The most basic regulation will state that you do not connect anything except signal and control voltages to the cable blocks. Certainly never ever any thing as lethal as 220 volts AC. It was another case of do something to get the job done and never mind the consequences.
Next page. Chapter 9 Home brew