32v power plants and no running water

and you wonder what on earth I am talking about?

There was a report in yesterday's media about a place we once lived in. The "golf course" there is apparently under water. I say "golf course" rather than golf course because I am sure it is more sand traps than nice, well kept grassy greens. It's in a very remote location - not the most remote perhaps but still very remote. It doesn't rain much there so it really was newsworthy for people to be kayaking on the golf course. I don't imagine it was very safe either - but people do tend to take risks in that part of the world, more risks than usual. 

We went to live there a very long time ago. My parents were appointed to the two teacher school there. My mother taught the first three years/ The Senior Cat taught everyone else. 

When we first went there the region had been in the grip of a five year drought - and it didn't break in the two years we were there. The house we moved into was "new" - that is, it had been built in the previous year but nobody had used it. It was built on land that had not been properly cleared so there were trees growing under the house. It was made of fibro-asbestos sheeting. It had been tacked together in the roughest possible way. The rooms were so small my parents spent the two years there sleeping head to toe - you couldn't put two beds side by side and getting a double bed in would have been  impossible. Middle Cat and I slept on the floor because you couldn't get beds in the other bedroom at all. Brother Cat slept in another room so small that his mattress was jammed against the Senior Cat's desk. 

There was no running water into the house when we arrived. The water came onto the property through an inch wide pipe which ran across the top of the ground. The source was a reservoir of salty (not sea) water over 300km away. In summer it was too hot to put your hands under the "cold" tap. Water into the house appeared about six weeks later...so that our mother could run it into the copper to do the washing by hand. There was a fire under the copper and a wood burning stove in the kitchen. The Senior Cat had to chop the iron hard mallee roots to burn in that. All this had to be done even when the temperature was still well over 40'C late at night. 

There was no electricity for the first six months we were there. The Senior Cat then helped the man from the Electricity and Water Supply to put in an engine which powered a 32v plant. Wow! We actually had dim lights at night instead of candles and lamps. Of course the plant didn't always work and it would often fail altogether. (There was something wrong with it but the combined efforts of the E&WS man and the Senior Cat and a farmer or two never succeeded in discovering just what that was.)

The "general store" stocked basics - like potatoes and pumpkin. Bread came in once a week - or you made your own. I could go on but that much might give you a glimpse of what it was like.

Now someone remarked on Twitter yesterday she was tired of people saying to her, a mother of four who works at a university, that they "don't know how she does it". I know how she does it. She does it because she works hard but I think even she would agree that she has it easy compared with people like my parents and others like them. She has lights and power at the flick of a switch, a supermarket to shop in and much more.  Yes, she works hard but compared with people like my parents she is surely more comfortable?

When people say to me, "Don't you ever want to go back to the places you lived in?" I can only answer,"No. It wasn't good. It was hard. We children found it hard too. We were "the teachers' kids" and considered outsiders. Like the local children we missed out on a lot of experiences city and less remote children took for granted.  I don't want to see those places again even if they have a golf course now."

Is that so very wrong?