VIII. Day With Layla: Part One - Built It In Order To Destroy Family
VIII. Day With Layla: Part One
He sat alone in front of his computer. He was supposed to be studying the water supply system extensively and continue planning the construction of the sewage system. He was driven, though he was not a man who congratulated himself for the sense of self-worth. The result had be to there, and the process in which he attained the result alone had the meaning. Nonetheless, he was human after all. He could not help feeling great despair; there were days that he did not feel like getting up to look at another report of colossal catastrophe. For this reason, he often made appointments for mornings so that he was obliged to get up, take bath, shave, get dressed properly and get ready. But even that was not enough; he had to speak to someone about his struggle to seek relief.
Layla was a Canadian woman. While he continued his work, he utilized social networks on the internet; he encountered her in one of social networks. Messages were exchanged and two got to know each other more than their acquaintances did, but they never met face-to-face before, nor did they have any plan to do so in near future. Engineer felt great comfort and relief in ‘chatting’ with her though. Every now and then, he just started telling her about the project so that he could breeze, gain sanity and take another step forward. And tonight, he saw her through her webcam. Her room looked rather dark, but it was probably because of the camcorder’s setting. Frame rate was not great, but given the physical distance between the two and the poor quality of the internet connection that he got in the city, he could not do much about it. He started typing to tell her, his cyber friend, what he was up to. “Residents of the city receive water only a few hours per day because of inadequate management of the distribution system. Limited amount of water supply leads to recycle of water, but there is no modern recycling system, and thus, this essentially leads to contaminate water. A large number of residents or almost all of city residents greatly suffer from this. Even if they can somehow manage to bring water from a nearby water source like protected well or public standpipe, they need to devote so much of their time and energy just to get relatively clean water. Under such condition, they cannot conceive of ‘quality’ of life. Another tragedy is that the upper class negligently concludes that ‘the poor’ suffer because they are ‘the poor’. The upper class, who are supposedly educated do not come to realize that water is a shared resource regardless of their preferences or ideologies, or they refuse to believe it. They only focus on securing it for them alone by purchasing bottled water and install the water purifier. Good attempt, but whatever they do does not fundamentally solve the problem. This obviously affects commercial activities as well. Factories have very difficult time operating or they simply cannot operate. Even the service sector suffers because lack of water means that lack of functional basic utilities such as restroom, sink to wash hands, and small kitchen to make tea and coffee and wash cups. … The sewerage network has not been maintained properly over the years, and this has resulted in the overflow of raw sewage in open drains. Blockages, settlements and inadequate pumping capacities only worsen the situation. Why is this negligence? It turns out that revenues of the city were just sufficient to cover about 60% of operating costs of its utility in 2004. Maintenance has, as a result, been minimal. The situation has not improved much since then. It has probably gotten a lot worse. In the past, the city’s utility has relied heavily on the federal government’s financial support for recurrent and capital expenditures in the magnitude of 65 million dollars per year and 155 million dollars per year respectively. As financial support for both capital and recurrent expenditures has been passed on as loans by the municipal, the utility’s balance sheet is loaded with a huge debt totaling about 1.1 billion dollars. Accounts receivable represent more than 12 months of billing, part of it being non- recoverable. I was flabbergasted when I learned this. Now, I do believe in the pure and ideal form of capitalism is the foundation of wealth creation, but I do not think that even that is not a perfect system. It has its flaws. And because of that, I am not for privatizing the water supply system. However, only the government could accumulate this much debt, keep this horrendous balance sheet and manage to survive for years somehow. If this were operated by a private company, the company would have gone bankrupt long ago. Look, I run business. I own an engineering consulting firm. I admit that its accounting is not in perfect order from time to time, but it was never this messy. Also, at the end of the day, I have to take responsibility. If I mess up, I go down. But this government …”
