Fireman Tax

In a village consisting of mostly bamboo houses, you’d be right in thinking we would also have a fire brigade in case one of the houses burned down at some point. You would be quite wrong. Even though we all pay for fire service, we don’t even have one fireman in the village. The nearest fire station is in Muisne. After watching at least two houses and two hotels burn to the ground in less than ten minutes during my time in Mompiche, I installed two fire extinguishers in my house, one at either end of the kitchen, in case of fire. Once, I had to use one of them in an emergency when the oven burst into flames one night after being incorrectly installed.

This happened several years ago. My friend and I had been making pizza in my brand new gas oven. It had just been delivered and installed that afternoon and I was excited to cook something with it as soon as possible. I invited a friend for dinner. We’d made gluten-free pastry and piled it up with tomato and herb sauce, loads of fresh vegetables, and a faux cheese sauce to make vegan pizza. We were both hungry and had been looking forward to our freshly made Italian style veggie pizza.

Then, suddenly, the entire oven was engulfed in flames. My kitchen is made from hardwood from floor to ceiling. Obviously, a raging fire in a wooden kitchen is not ideal. Red hot flames reached across the kitchen and tried to grasp the walls. Quick as a flash, I grabbed the extinguisher and sprayed yellow powder all over the oven to put it out. Then, I ran downstairs to shut off the gas tank. Miraculously, the pizza survived undamaged and without a spec of the monoammonium phosphate that coated the rest of the kitchen. Despite its harrowing ordeal, our dinner was delicious.

On inspection, after sweeping up all the yellow powder, I discovered that the guy who had installed the oven had run the gas lines way too close to the oven and they had melted. The following day, I spent hours undoing the shoddy installation work and reinstalled new gas lines a reasonable distance from the heat and gas flames. My oven is an older model and slightly more basic than the one below, it doesn’t have temperature control (for example) and its legs are much shorter, but you get the idea. Had I not had the foresight to buy fire extinguishers, I could easily have lost my house.

But why didn’t you call the nearest fire brigade? I hear you ask. They’re two hours away in another town. By the time they arrived, my house would have been nothing but ashes and heartache. Even though we pay for these firemen, they are absolutely useless to us. But let’s do the math. Every month, I pay $2.25 in fireman tax. It’s an automatic addition to my monthly electricity bill. I can’t even fight it. Pay up or get cut off. Yearly, that’s $27. Well, that doesn’t really seem like much, does it?

Let’s take another look at these figures. Over fifteen years, it adds up to $405. That’s not small change. I’ve paid over $400 for what? For nothing. Zero services. But it doesn’t end there. That’s just me. Let’s say there are 400-500 houses in Mompiche. If we calculate an average, say 450 houses, paying $2.25 per month over fifteen years, Mompiche has forked out around $182,250 for a fire brigade that we don’t have. And I’m not even counting the years of fire brigade tax that was paid by everyone else before I began paying it. We could easily round that up to $200,000. So where did all our money go? Because it certainly didn’t come here.

At one point, we asked the fire department if they could, at the very least, send a squad to train local people and teach us how to effectively put out fires safely. Nope. That never happened. Despite messages back and forth over several months, no training plan ever came to fruition. So what do we do when a bamboo house catches on fire? Endless buckets of water are thrown at it from all directions to put out the fire and stop the spread to other houses, most of us knowing full well we probably can’t save the burning house or its contents. Is it safe? Probably not. The majority of us don’t wear shoes most of the time. None of us have fire safety or breathing equipment. Most houses don’t have extinguishers. It’s a frantic and panicked rush to put out flames, but there is no organized effort around it. Between constant power cuts causing the endless use of candles lighting darkened rooms and faulty wiring by amateur “electricians” barely qualified to switch on a toaster, we’re very lucky more houses don’t burn to the ground.

For $200,000, you’d think we’d finally end up with something to show for it. We won’t. Nobody cares about Mompiche. And still, we pay our fireman tax every month knowing full well that we’ll receive nothing for our money. With $400, I could do some stuff; take a vacation, get the house painted, renovate the kitchen. I’ll never get that money back. None of us will. And still, we continue to pay our fireman tax and rely on the kindness of locals willing to put themselves in danger with zero training or equipment in case of fire…