Myrna,
It's too bad it didn't have directions. Generally, when you compost, you add your kitchen scraps, except for citrus and meat products. You put in some grass clippings, dead leaves, etc...
You don't need to add water. From the sounds of it, your problem was that you only had leaves in your compost. They will decompose, but take much longer.
For a good compost mix, you need your kitchen scraps, leaves, grass clippings, etc.....
Since you no longer have the composter, you have some choices.
You could make a compost pile directly on your soil, and build it up that way. The difficulty there is that you may have some complaints about the smell from your neighbors.
You could use buckets to compost. Depending on how much waste kitchen scraps and yard waste you have, that could add up to a lot of buckets. And those buckets would have to be turned, or the contents shaken up to speed up decompositon.
You could get a 50 gallon drum, with a lid to use as a composter, but again, it needs to be shaken up to help speed up composting.
Or, you could get another composter and learn how to use it to compost. A composter is just like using a barrel, only much easier to turn it to speed up the decomposing.