typhoid

Third day without water. The whole town is affected. Thankfully we have a swimming pool. Nicely-chlorinated water is being used for just about everything: flushing the loo, bathing (we heat buckets full of the gas ring when there's no power), hair-washing, clothes-washing, washing cholera off the vegetables.

Our clothes have been washed by hand in the bath for ages now. But this week, even in the plush suburbs, maids will be bending over baths and slapping the soap-suds out. We keep a couple of centimetres of water in the bottom of the basin to wash our hands in. By the end of the day, it's grimy-grey.

The cats are thirsty: one nearly fell into the bucket this morning trying to sip a drop of chlorine. We can't waste precious drinking water on them -- who knows how long the municipality will take to fix the pipe from the Pungwe -- but milk is expensive.

My husband spends an hour or so morning and night fetching buckets of water from the pool to fill the baby bath (which we squeeze into, one by one). "If you were a good Shona wife, you'd be doing this on your own," he warns me darkly.

Oh, and typhoid's broken out in Harare's northern suburb of Mabvuku. Five dead so far and 40 infected. Mabvuku was the epicentre of the cholera epidemic in 2008: typhoid, like cholera, spreads fastest where there's poor sanitation. Not-so-happy times ahead, I fear.