Would you (a) encourage everyone with a bank account to set up an automatic payment/standing order to cover the cost, installing water meters only where people had no bank account while at the same time making it plain to those with accounts that if they didn’t pay they would get cut off; or would you (b) insist that absolutely everybody have a pre-payment meter installed at a cost to every single person of some TL 350 to be repaid through their water bill over the next few years?A no-brainer, surely. This is the 21st century, and everyone pays their phone and television bills by standing order, so why shouldn’t they be able to do the same with their water bills? Sadly, however, here in Göreme, the powers-that-be have opted for option (b), and throughout the winter men have been braving the cold to fit us all out with these wonderful and expensive new meters.
It’s been a pretty hit-and-miss affair though, and last week, tired of worrying vaguely that I would soon be cut off as a non-payer because the meter men hadn’t managed to catch me in, I wandered down to the belediye (municipality) to find out what was going on. Of course, the great thing about living in a small community as opposed to somewhere like İstanbul or Ankara is that we all know each other, so within minutes of my explaining my worries I was climbing into a car with a meter man and heading home to sort things out.
“Do they have these meters in Avanos?” I asked him as that was where was he’d said he was from.
“Yes,” he replied.
“But not in Ürgüp or Ortahisar?”
“Not yet,” he said with a grin which rather confirmed my suspicion that this is probably the first step on the road to privatization which would require all outstanding bills to be paid up in order to attract a buyer.
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, the new meters come with a card rather like a credit card onto which you load money at the belediye. You then slot the card into the machine, wait until the screen lights up in blue, then remove it again and store it away carefully. Some time before your credit runs out the meter will start bleeping. You then reinsert the card to activate the remaining credit and while it’s running out head for the belediye again to put more money on the card.
“I’ll pay TL 100 now then,” I said, hoping to be able to forget all about it for the foreseeable future.
“Ah, but if you put more than TL 30 on at any one time the tariff is higher,” I was told.
Go figure! “And what if the money runs out over the weekend when the belediye is closed?”
“The water can’t be cut off at the weekend,” I was assured. So that’s that. Brave new water world? Somehow I very much doubt it!
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
