The Water Man's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

completed at your convenience. I expect you to have someone looking after the steel twenty-four seven.”
    Mr. M. shakes his head. “You don’t understand, Mr. Matthews. No officer would agree to be stationed in the streets all night. It is too dangerous.”
    Alvin sighs, exasperated. Peter stands up.
    “I understand.” Peter sees Alvin start to interject and motions for him to be quiet. “I understand that your people understand money. So pay them more. Give them more guns. They’re worried about dying in the street? Make it something they can’t refuse. With the amount of company money you’ve squeezed out of us already –” Peter ends abruptly. He moves to silence Alvin again, but his outburst has stunned more than just the councillor and Alvin has moved to the farthest corner of his chair. Peter ignores the reaction. Apparently, Alvin hasn’t made it clear to the councillors just what they are dealing with. He knows as well as Peter that this project is vital to the company’s international expansion. The whole world is watching to seehow South Africa’s water experiment works out. The entire continent’s water system depends on this project. Peter is not going to let it fall apart here.
    “What would it take to convince the people that the work we’re doing is to their benefit?” He tries another tactic, tries to soften his tone.
    “Perhaps another ad campaign, this time only in the township, with the young male demographic in mind?” Mr. M. offers a quiet suggestion.
    Peter responds quickly. “God no, we have to get at the women if we want to keep those people in line.” This is something Alvin has missed. Peter reviewed their strategy to date and found myriad briefing papers on local hiring practices and school visits. All money spent on men and children. But the Phiri Community Forum – their chief opposition, if you could call it that – is mostly made up of women. Their leader is a woman too, if he remembers the reports correctly.
    Mr. M. leans forward. He uses his arms for emphasis, obviously frustrated with the finer points he is sure Peter is missing about the situation in
his
township. “The women will be controlled by their men.”
    “Oh, really?” Peter leans in as well. “You think the men have done a good job so far controlling their women, keeping them away from protest meetings and stopping them tampering with our meter boxes?”
    “The men have not had the proper incentives to be completely on our side. We are working on them, gettingthem to understand that the women must not be allowed to undo all of the township’s progress.” Mr. M. looks to his cohorts; they listen to the translation behind them and then nod their agreement at Peter.
    Peter wants to believe that the women can be controlled. He can’t really imagine how the women of the township manage to organize the undoing of every pipe system they install. On his last visit, Alvin took him into the community that would become the central location of the company’s service system pilot project, and they found themselves at the mercy of just one of these insurgents.
    They were doing background research on community repayment, trying to understand how debts could grow so large in otherwise stable areas of the township. Alvin left Peter alone in a house with a huge woman rustling in the background in search of the water meter printout that detailed her usage for the last month. The living room stank of warm milk and rotting vegetables and the windows covered with wrought-iron bars and thick glass let in little light and no air. He was desperate for escape from the whole township by the time Alvin returned to announce that the company car’s tires had been slashed and it would be hours until a replacement could arrive to transport them back to the hotel.
    Hours of sickly sweet tea and the smell. By the end of the day he felt as inhuman as the people in that godforsaken shantytown: part dust, part liquor on the breath,