My family lives in a poor, dry country. About 80% of it is desert and it usually 'rains' once every 18 months. Since we don't get rainstorms and we only have one river, home flooding is mainly caused by faulty plumbing and / or lack of maintenance. My country is a place where you are lucky if you live in a basement, and luckier still if you have what it takes to get a flooded basement (running water and plumbing). A very small percentage of privileged people actually have cause to dread flooded basements and the damage they can cause to stored personal belongings.



The first time our family had to deal with a flooded basement was the summer right after my father had died. I had hastily moved his furniture into our basement, stuck his personal belongings into suitcases and his paperwork into trunks, all to be stored in the basement. I was planning to give the clothes to the deserving poor, but I figured they'd been poor and deserving for so long, they could certainly wait until after we got back from our well-deserved summer vacation in Italy.

A blocked connection between our house's plumbing system and the public sewer system is what caused the basement to flood that first time. We had been away for three weeks, enough time for the suitcases and their contents to be utterly ruined. I watched the servants' faces as they carried out the bits and pieces of ruined leather suitcases and moldy, musty clothes. They had been waiting for our return, I thought. The flooded basement had robbed them of warm winter coats, sturdy genuine-leather shoes and blankets. It gets very cold in a desert climate at night, and central heating is something these people only see on television.

Looking out of my window that afternoon, I glimpsed the garbage collectors sifting through the mounds of trash that had come out of our flooded basement. The servants hadn't had the heart to burn and destroy the contaminated clothes. A little boy found a pair of wearable shoes and ran off, chased by others. I didn't feel I could blame the flooded basement for the way that made me feel.

The second time we had a flooded basement, the reason was a pipe leak. There was no wastewater in the basement this time. My sons were 12 and 15 years old by then. They had outgrown their bicycles, had switched from tennis to soccer to basketball, had changed their minds about taking guitar lessons and had up-graded their video games. Everything they no longer 'needed' was in the flooded basement.

I got my sons out of school early that day. I made them wade into the flooded basement and carry out the things they had discarded, ignoring their protests, "But it smells!" and, "What if there are rats swimming in there?" I owed my children that much. They had to learn the valuable lesson the flooded basement had taught me years before.