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A Boy Plumber

Adana, Turkey

By Charlene Ada BuggPublished 4 years ago 2 min read
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A Boy Plumber
Photo by Kat J on Unsplash

I was stationed at Incirlik Air Base, Turkey 1983 -1985, and lived in Adana, Turkey, and in 1984, this was my second apartment. It was on the 6th floor and my 4 yr old daughter lived with me. In order to have hot water, I had to hire a plumber because there was no hot water in any of these apartments in the six story building. A friend of mine, Turgut, a Turkish man, in his late twenties, who I had taught some English, translated for me. Turgut said if I wanted hot water, I had to pay for the new hot water pipes and all the hot water for everyone in the apartment building. Since it was so cheap, I agreed to it, even though I was kind of leery of how much I might be charged but they assured me it was very minimal and my first bill wouldn't be there for three or four months.

Two men were teaching a young boy to be a plumber who came with them, maybe 10 years old, he did all the work. Sometimes the men would become angry with the boy because he wasn't doing as they told him and the young boy seemed to know he was doing things wrong and was sad.

Anyway, by the time they were done, I had hot water in the toilet, cold water in the tub, and hot water in the sink. I don't even remember how much money the plumber costed but it wasn't a lot. When the water bill for all the apartments came, it was just like they promised, and ended up being like $35 or $45.00. I didn't have them redo the water in the toilet and bathtub because I was a tight wade at the time. The toilet was rather smelly when I flushed it so I made a beeline out of there whenever I flushed it and didn't flush it much because of the smell. For the bathtub, I had to run a garden hose from the sink to the bathtub for the rest of the time I lived there. It was an old hose so part of the water ended up on the marble floor which was fine because the floor had a drain for when my maid washed my Turkish carpet. But it took so long to get any amount of water in the tub that it was always cold. I may have had my own water heater like I did in the last apartment. I do remember having to buy and have a transformer installed to convert 220 to 110.

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