I have experienced ongoing plumbing problems since arriving here. Talking bathrooms and kitchens and drains here. Just wanted to make that clear, considering my advanced age.

The latest? The bathroom sink that keeps oozing.

This is the suppurating wound of  leaks. No matter what we do, it just keeps going.

To recap: At the Teeny Apartment, the windows leaked whenever it rained and the kitchen sink, when draining, tended to back up onto the floor through the drain they put in the ground in all bathrooms and kitchens in this country. The drain could handle only X amount of water at once, and if we exceeded that volume the rest was going to begin pooling up through the holes in the floor drain and into the kitchen. Had to learn to regulate that flow … as well as caulk up the window sills.

At the new place, we have three issues. One is the shower. The head aims downward, and won’t flex up at all. Hence, water tends to splash back against the wall, collect along the rim of the tub and pour over the side and onto the bathroom floor. Like, quarts. It’s exasperating to pull open the shower curtain and find everything soaked. One possible way to solve this would be to replace the shower head and the hinge into which it fits, so that the water can be directed more into the middle of the tub, away from the wall …

But that isn’t our most annoying and persistent problem.

That would be the bathroom sink, which has been dripping since Day 1.

The problems are on two levels. First, down below. A steady drip from the plastic hose that drains away the water soaked the main storage area under the sink and then oozed into the secondary storage area beneath it. Ack.

So, we complained to Mr. Mohammed, who has some talents, but plumbing pretty clearly is not near the top of the list.

He came in with a guy in plumbers’-type shoes, who made an enormous mess but walked away as if he had solved the problem. He had not. Not only was it still dripping, below, it now was leaking out the base of the faucet and standing about a quarter-inch deep on the porcelain.

And here is the weird part: Even after shutting off both the hot and cold water valves, the water kept coming. From where? Did the valves leak? Apparently, yes.

Mr. Mohammed came back, after we pointed this out, and later said he spent four hours working on it (while we were at work) and installed a new faucet (as well as a blue-colored drain plug), plus a new hose beneath, and thought he had it solved.

Uh, no. The leak continued both above and below. By then, I had brought out a bowl to catch the drops, dumping it about every 12 hours.

The best part of all this was explaining the issues to Mr. Mohammed, and then having him make pronouncements and announcements in his really limited English. I was never quite sure what his plan was, aside from that he seemed to have a plan. For fixing it. Eventually.

Later that same night, he came back after we mentioned the leakage both above and below, looked at it, sighed, seemed to say something about having put in a new faucet and a new drain hose, and what was up with this, anyway … and disappeared. I thought he’d given up for the day, but then he came back with Another Guy. I’ve seen this other guy a time or three, and he seems to be generically talented in matters technical.

Anyway, he looked at it and got busy. He seemed almost arrogant about this. Like, “You’ve got the right guy, finally.”

They spend about an hour in the bathroom, and when they came out yet another drainage hose was in place, a stouter one, and even more caulk/silicon had been pasted around the base of the drain. The two of them just walked out of the apartment, making no announcement at all … but they were done.

So, we went into the bathroom and the drip from the drain hose … was gone! Hurray!

But as 10, 15 minutes passed … we saw the drain from the faucet was still there.

Since it comes out slowly, and never seems to reach a point where it spills on the floor … we’re just chilling with that right now. We have a sponge out where the water collects, and a couple times per day we squeeze the sponge and put it back down.

Anyway, we have the water back on for the bathroom sink, and we’re not brushing our teeth in the kitchen sink anymore, which is a big move forward.

Kinda weird, how many times we’ve had issues with water being where it shouldn’t in a country that is 100 percent desert. Some sort of cosmic joke.