Pumping at night

This week the papers found Bãi Xép (Thanh Niên, VnExpress, Giáo dục & Thời đại), a fishing village on the coast south of Quy Nhơn. Two hundred households, nine hundred people, five public wells. The central well is ten metres deep and carries nearly twenty electric pumps, one for each family that draws from it. I photographed it in the summer of 2023 (The 21st-century communal well). In the dry season the water runs low and turns salty, so people take turns. “Máy bơm phải canh cả ngày lẫn đêm,” one woman told the reporter. You have to watch the pumps day and night. Some stay up until it is their turn.

The article reminded me of my father. In 1970 his firstborn was not yet one, and had diarrhoea from the condensed milk. Every Sunday at four in the morning, right at the start of his leave, my father was at the communal well washing the cotton nappies. He went early to avoid the queue for water.

In 1990, our house had its own well. The pump looked exactly like the ones in Bãi Xép: the same grey PVC, the same cheerful red stopcocks on the pipe used for priming. More often than not, you poured water in before you could pump water out. When people came to rent a room or two, they sent a sample to the Pasteur lab, and it came back clean. For the floods, there was a hand pump.

There was mains water too, but it was only reliable at night. After dark it filled a tank on the ground, and a float shut the tap when the tank was full. The pump lifted the water to a tank on the roof, where two floats switched the pump on when the level fell and off when it was full. At night, now and then, a click, then the pump running.

Bãi Xép is three kilometres from a software campus, and a little over ten from the centre of Quy Nhơn. The plan is a pumping station for the whole village: 500 cubic metres a day, 21 billion đồng. The province has asked for a proposal.