Honeysucker!

It's time I introduced you to the 'Honeysucker'. No, this is not an exotic bird with colourful plumage, this is a machine that quite literally keeps us out of the s**t! A tanker driven and manned by wonderful people and I cannot praise them enough! They must have one of the worst jobs that I can think of, and yet they are cheerful, polite and efficient.

The Honeysucker in position!

Before we moved here, we didn't really think twice about where our waste water went! (We have always used water sparingly however, well aware of the shortages and possible rationing that a dry season brings.)So, we would flush the loo, pull out a plug, watch the water head down the drain and that was that. That was city living! But, here in the village, every house has an underground tank that collects all the waste water, and as it is a closed tank, it fills up and needs to be emptied! Regularly! Then life becomes a sort of Russian roulette, as you wait to see if the toilet empties........or fills! Some brave people check the tank regularly, Rob being one of them. Others wait until the situation is desperate, and others still leave it until the tank begins to overflow! I shall never forget the sight of a neighbour with a towel wrapped round his waist, flagging the tanker down and begging the crew to help him out of a sticky situation!

Big enough for a whale!

Our ground is very rocky, some granite and some sandstone, some fairly soft and some as hard as.....well......rock!! So, when it was time to dig the hole for the sewage tank, our builders battled to get their shovels into the ground. As picks and shovels proved useless, the words ‘blasting’ and ‘dynamite’ were bandied about until the ‘Makulu Baas’ (Big Boss) came up with a plan! At the same time that we were building, Telkom were digging ditches along the roadsides ready for the telephone cables, using heavy diggers, so one lunch time he slipped the driver a little something and within an hour we had a hole big enough to bury a whale! We thought that we would have an enormous tank, but no, because the hole began to mysteriously fill with all sorts of rubbish, from broken tiles, paint tins, cracked toilets, empty cement bags, wood, garden rubbish and cigarette 'stompies'! So we have a medium size tank surrounded by other builder's junk! And a garden on top of it that has maybe five centimetres of soil and is impossible to plant anything in!

Before the rubble filled it.

A phone call to the municipality is all it takes to book the tanker and within 24 hours stress free living resumes!

The team at work.

These are the real ‘Hells Angels’