Just a Quick Update on the Gen

I fired Abel the other day. Eno and I took the gen to “camp,” which is basically a giant “street market” full of various mechanical and electrical type workers and equipment, spare parts, etc. It was higher in altitude than where we normally traverse and the drive provided a nice view. We left the gen with a guy named “Anselm” on Saturday who said he’d be able to give us an estimate on rebuilding the AVR by Monday or so. No guarantees, of course, but I am cautiously optimistic.

Where did we find this guy Anselm? Well that gets me to a little longer story. On Friday afternoon, I was going to go over to my neighbour’s house to present their family with a “baby shower” gift, so to speak. The formality here is to ALWAYS inquire about your family as a part of the greeting. When Okese asked about Stephanie and Timothy, I expressed that Stephanie was less than happy about the fact that it’s always 100 degrees and we haven’t had a generator in over three weeks due to an inept repair guy and my inability to fire the guy. Okay. So I wasn’t quite that blunt, but words to that effect, Stephanie’s not happy, it’s hot outside and our gen is three weeks’ kaput now.

I was floored by the response. Okese (and his wife Stephanie) graciously offered to loan us their backup generator until we get ours fixed. Within 20 minutes, it was connected, and power was flowing to our house through Okese’s backup generator. We were stunned. Unable to express our happiness that we can “on the lights,” or, even more importantly, the fans, when the heat becomes unbearable.

Long story short, Okese gave me the name of a guy in “Camp” who we should take our broken generator to, and he in turn called Anselm when we arrived and he found out it was an electrical problem.

Obviously we are still in need of a more permanent solution, but we are extremely pleased with our current workaround!

Electricity Part II (Longish)

Did I mention how much the electricity (or lack thereof) annoys me? Let’s see. On a day some three weeks ago, we had power most of the night, it went off around 5 or 6 a.m., came back on at 8:30. Was on until noon or so. Stayed off until about 3:30. Came one for about half an hour. Off for another hour. Turned the generator on around 5:00. Power came back about 5:45. Turned the generator off. Power went out again around 6:15. Back on at 7 p.m. Off again at 7:30. Our compound’s security guard and gatekeeper, Everistus, tried in vain to get our generator going. I went outside to investigate Everistus’ handiwork. Stephanie thought maybe the engine was flooded. I was inclined to agree. I told Everistus we didn’t need gen power tonight. NEPA (the so-called power company) came back on at 9:45. Off in less than three minutes. Went to bed around 10 expecting power at any moment.

On that particular night we heard singing start just around dusk. The singing went on and on and on. It was melodious. But after about two and a half hours of it we were done. I asked Everistus about it and he said it was for a wake at the Catholic church nearby. Yes. That’s how they do wakes here. An all night prayer and singing affair. I found out much later that they do that every Wednesday eve/Thursday a.m. from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Christ the King parish, “Adoration” ministry. They worship for twelve hours straight, coming from miles around.

Generally speaking, power is on most of the night. Off for a couple hours in the morning. On for a good part of the day. Off for a good part of the early evening. You find that you may have power anywhere from nine or ten to upwards of seventeen or eighteen hours per day. Usually not less than nine or ten. Usually not more than seventeen or eighteen.

Here’s how it might look on a “normal” day. Of course, there is really no such thing as “normal,” here, given our paradigm of life.

Power off from 7 to 9 a.m.

Power on from 9 a.m. till noon or so

Power off from noon till 2 p.m.

Power back on until maybe 6 or 7 p.m.

Power off from 6 or 7 until 10 p.m.

Power on from 10 p.m. till 7 a.m.

You may notice the power fluctuation seems to coincide with when people are home from work and awake. Yeah. I noticed that, too.

A good friend of mine bought a “headlamp” for me. It runs on three AAA batteries. I use it most every day. Thanks, Tom.

A couple days into using the generator we found we had a problem. It was no longer generating properly. Eno came over on his machine (so they call motorbikes here) and he looked at it. No luck. Theory being the carburetor needs to be serviced. We loaded the “gen” into the truck and headed out to find a repair guy. The first place we stopped, the guy was too busy to look at it that day. The second place we stopped, the guy looked at it for about 45 minutes while we waited outside in the heat. Finally, the mechanic determined he could have the carburetor repaired by 4 p.m. (roughly two hours later). We came back and lo and behold it was working again! Yay!! And it only cost me $27. Next day it’s down again. The machine will run but it won’t power anything. Take it back to the guy who “fixed” it. He couldn’t make it go. It’s an electrical problem. But if we wanted to wait a couple days, the electrician he works with could probably fix it. Nevermind. We’ll find someone else. We did. And he fixed it again. Cost me close to $45. Brought it home. It ran power in our house for about twenty minutes before giving up the ghost. Back to square one. Generator doesn’t work. Abel comes back the next day. Works on it some more. He needs $150 or more to replace the coil and the housing for the coil. And then some more for labor. And it’s going to take upwards of a week. Ugh. Will this nightmare ever end?

We have two rooms with a/c units, one of which, our bedroom, we spend 75% our time at home, and the other, the office, we spend less than 1% of our time. Needless to say, the a/c is not running in the office very often. To make matters worse, even when we do get our generator back up and running (assuming we actually do), it may or may not run one of the a/c units, and if it does, it would only be the one in the office.

Three weeks later from Abel starting work on the generator’s coils . . . gen is still not working. I will not go into all of the details surrounding our frustrations with the gen. Not in this post anyway. However, Abel has been over here working on it quite a bit lately. One of those times, he said he would be here at 8 in the morning, and he actually arrived at 8:45, which was pretty amazing considering his track record.

We just completed another major bout of extended time without power last week. Fifty-two hours this time, nearly straight, without power. Monday around 6 a.m. power went out. All day Monday it was off, it came back on twice that evening, once for ten minutes, the second time for about twenty minutes. Then nothing. Nothing Monday overnight. Nothing Tuesday all day. Nothing Wednesday morning till about… 11 a.m. It flickered on and off twice that hour before coming on for a couple hours that afternoon. Then power, glorious power, all night having come on around 10:30 p.m. The four days previous to the 52 hour outage, we knew something was up, as power did not come on at its usual 10 or 11 p.m., but rather, came on around 2:30 a.m. We were seriously close to losing about 10 pounds worth of meat in our freezer when the power finally came back on Wednesday noon. And more than one “breaking point” was reached within our respective mental and emotional states.

Did I mention the problems we’ve been having with the gas for our gas stove? Oh. I didn’t? I guess I will save that for another post. Imagine trying to cook something without a stove or a microwave and you’ll soon be able to imagine life here. Not really… but there were a couple moments of concern we wouldn’t be able to cook a meal here or there. They were short lived as we found a workaround.

One last complaint, and, hopefully, the last one you will hear from me regarding the sporadic availability of electricity. I was reading an “update” from the McLeans recently in which they recounted the “60 hour outage” we experienced the first week we were here. As I read it, I realized that when you read such things, it usually doesn’t affect you, the reader. It doesn’t impact you like it does when you are the one actually going through it. You aren’t the one who is worried that the stores of meat you have labored to prepare and freeze may be lost because the financial cost to run the generator for the amount of time necessary to save the meat exceeds the value of the meat itself. You aren’t the one who sits in bed wide awake at 2:30 a.m., on three hours of sleep, unable to go back to sleep because it’s 87 degrees in the house and 84 degrees outside and there are no windows you can open to start a cross-breeze because the house is configured for being air-conditioned. Wait a moment. I said at the outset of this paragraph that I had one final complaint. What was it again? Ah yes. The complaint. Here it is. My complaint is that when there is no electricity, there is no relief. No a/c. No fan. Might as well get in the car and go for a drive in the air-conditioned Pajero. But when NEPA goes out in the middle of the afternoon, it seems that the lack of power completely saps all of our energy and any ability to even move or think, thus making even the walk to the Pajero seem not worth the effort. As I said, the heat is relentless.

Food

Yay! We are back online after a 52 hour long power outage and even longer (like five days) before my cell provider’s network coverage was fully restored to the area where we live.

Back to the topic at hand…

For the first eleven days we were here we ate like royalty. Sis. McLean is one of the finest home cooks I have ever encountered. And when you consider the limitations of things she is dealing with as far as availability of ingredients, I can’t think of anyone I know who could put on a better home cooked meal here. I sure can’t. For my first home cooked meal, I made a southwestern scramble; sautéed up some garlic, onion and green pepper with some homemade breakfast sausage and added some eggs. Timothy had leftover meatloaf as he is not a big on eggs.

Meal #2: Burgers, Fried Plantain and Boiled Potato. I was thrilled to be cooking plantains in hot oil. I was thrilled to be eating them. Stephanie and Timothy… not so much. A little disappointing, but that means the leftovers are all MINE!

Bought a paw paw. I had no idea what that meant. Did I mention that the oranges here are green? Very tasty. Tasty as the tastiest Florida’s best in January. Tasted the paw paw. It’s kind of like a cantaloupe that tastes kind of like honeydew. Not really. But since I don’t like either of those melons I didn’t really take a liking to the paw paw. Stephanie didn’t mind it.

You have to be careful with the eggs. You have to break each one into bowl by itself to make sure it doesn’t contain . . . how can I put this delicately for you vegans out there? You want to make sure it hasn’t progressed beyond the egg white / yolk stage of chick development. Too much information?

We are going to eat a lot of eggs. I can sense it. It’s one of those things that is easy to prepare, cheap, predictable, and did I mention easy to prepare and cheap?

Let’s see… what else is in our larder? Pineapple. We were pleased to discover that Timothy LOVES fresh pineapple. He eats it up first and asks for more before touching anything else on his plate. Beef, pork. The McLeans have an electric meat grinder. It helps enormously. For beef, you just buy the whole cut (all the cuts are priced identically) and grind the whole thing. Filet or chuck, arm or sirloin. It all goes in the grinder. For pork, you have to call the pig guy. He’ll kill the pig for you but then you get to cut it up, feed it into the grinder and add seasoning as befits sausages. Chicken I do not think we will bother with. They are tough and stringy birds here and more than I am inclined to mess with. But check back with me in a couple months. Maybe I will change my tune.

Bottled coke. Yum. Fanta. Um, I don’t like it as much as coke. Krest Bitter Lemon. That’s a new one. Unique. I like it. Kind of. It’s like a carbonated lemonade made with about one fourth the amount of sugar you’d normally use to make lemonade. I have been drinking Coke like it’s going out of style. At least one bottle a day, sometimes two. They’re 35 cl, which I think translates to something like 12 oz.

Shortbread. I couldn’t resist buying a small package one day. Five precious squares for $1.50.

Rice. Lots of rice. I tried making rice pancakes from rice flour the first week we were here. They were more like crepes. Good, but not the intended result. Stephanie had a similar difficulty. We need to decrease the amount of liquid in subsequent attempts. I made a spicy rice dish using one of the local peppers. They are very hot! If an habañero or a scotch bonnet is a “10” and a jalapeño is a “2” or a “3,” I would say these are something like a “7” or an “8.”

I love the food here. I would eat something different every day of my life if I could. Of course I am sure there are things I would want a second time… I could see myself growing weary of avocado. I think I’ve eaten something like eight of them in the last twelve days.

I’ve been making french fries for Timothy. He LOVES french fries.

Yams? Not. They are a staple here. They’re not like the ones back home. I intend to try cooking one soon.

It’s too bad mango season is nearly over. I really like mango. Bananas are ubiquitous. But sometimes more expensive than one might expect. One day I spent $2.10 for about a dozen small ones. Another day I spent $.60 for about seven or eight of a similar size. I think I bought both sets from the same vendor and they were of a similar quality. Pricing of items can make no sense here sometimes.

Let’s see… what else. Did I mention the Golden Toast? It’s one of the two restaurants the McLeans will go to here. They had some . . . shall I say “unique” items to choose from? In addition to some of the staples, coconut rice, jollof rice, moi moi, puréed yam, they had snails (big or little), scary fish, gizzard-kabobs . . . shall I go on?

I didn’t feel like cooking anything one night recently, so I headed to the Golden Toast and ordered coconut rice (to go with my limed avocado at home), and for Stephanie, spaghetti and a meat pie. The rice was surprisingly spicy and the meat pies were surprisingly tasty. The spaghetti went missing. They ended up giving us double the rice. Oh well. Better luck next time. Stephanie was content with the meat pie.

Church

My first church service in Nigeria was at Graceword Assembly in a village called Umahia just to the north in Abia State. Bro. McLean preached, and Eno (pronounced ay’-naw) drove. It was an ADVENTURE! Just what I had been looking forward to. Stephanie was having her own adventure (NOT) with Timothy not being able to handle more than thirty seconds of his first Nigerian church service.

My second church service was here in Enugu at the church connected with the Bible school here and I was asked to preach. This church, the Jesus For All Centre, is pastored by my good friend Darlynton (pronounced “Darlington”) Jakin. I say “good friend” because even though I have only known him a short while, and have talked to him only a small amount, I feel like he is kin. I am still awed and humbled by the fact that he took a ten hour bus ride to Abuja to pick up our luggage.

Impressions of my first two Nigerian Sunday church services? There is a lot of singing. I mean, a LOT. I mean, more than you can probably imagine. I think there was something on the order of close to an hour of singing in this second service. I can only understand something like half of what is sung. Many of the songs are similar if not nearly identical to songs we sing back home. Others… sound vaguely familiar, but I can’t make out the words or put my finger on the tune. I sang in the second service, just before I started preaching. My message was “More Like Jesus” and so I sang “Make Me More Like You.” I am always touched when the congregation starts singing with me!

Maybe I have a high tolerance for adapting to different kinds of church services due to my background, but church here does not feel a whole lot different from church back home. Except for the heat. And the increased amount of singing. And not being able to understand what is sung a goodly part of the time. Sweat dripping down your face because it’s 90 outside and 95 in the sanctuary. Okay, so I haven’t really experienced that yet. In Umahia the church almost felt air-conditioned due to the sweet breeze that drifted in the open windows and the placement of the building seemed to offset the blazing sun somehow. Church in Umahia was held in a grade school of sorts. There were diagrams of different structures of the body on a chalkboard that looked like it was part of the wall, in addition to English and Math lessons in different sections of the wall. Here in Enugu, the church has a generator that powers the six ceiling fans in the sanctuary which makes a world of difference.

Did I mention how they take offerings here? Everybody marches. Or dances.

They place the offering box in the middle of the sanctuary and they start singing another song. And then, one by one, or row by row, or however the local assembly does it, people will dance their way up to drop some naira in the box. The first service I did not dance my way to the offering box. The second service I did manage to at least make an effort to move my body in a way that seemed like it was stepping in time to the rhythm of the song. Stephanie would perhaps want me to mention something else about rhythm. She has always had no problem clapping in time back home. Here they clap differently. They will do a kind of syncopated rhythm, clapping once on the downbeat, then again three quarters of the way up to the second beat of the measure. Takes some getting used to.

You know what else takes getting used to? Being given a live chicken as part of the offering, and having it clucking in the backseat of your vehicle the whole ninety minute drive back home.

I’d wanted to get a picture of it while it was in the back of the truck, but Bro. McLean wanted to get it off of the carpet as soon as humanly possible when we pulled in to the driveway and I had to run upstairs to get the camera. I’m sorry I didn’t take another picture of it after it had been prepped for consumption or during any part of that experience. We were also given large bags of avocado, plantain, and oranges I think. The oranges here are green. Whaddya think of them apples? Apples, 60 naira a piece. That’s about $.34 with the current conversion rates. They’re small. But pineapple, $1.50 for one pineapple! Yum. More on food in my next post.

Security and Water Part II

You need a key for everything here.

The front gate to our compound is locked.  A guard dog and a security guard that monitors the gate.

When you pull your car up to the gate you honk your horn and the security guard (if he’s around) opens the gate for you to drive in.  Our car is locked and has a security system besides. The security measures for our house… there are no fewer than six security measures for our house.

We have an red iron gate that covers our porch. 

Behind the red metal square there is a padlock on the inside.

In addition to some maneuvering you need to do to unlock the padlock, you also have to pull the gate forward while sliding the deadbolt in order for it to open.

We have a key lock on the front door.

Once you are inside the house there are deadbolts at the top of the front door.

The back door is covered with an iron gate. 

There is also a deadbolt for this door.

On the gate there is an upper padlock.

And a lower padlock.

Not to mention the bars on all the windows. Or almost all the windows. Definitely all of the downstairs windows.

Maybe when we get back home I will post a video to Facebook regarding the locking/unlocking procedure.

p.s. In a previous post I mentioned I didn’t mind not having hot water when taking shower. But I must tell you now that I lost any and all appreciation for the quaintness of bathing here after we got into our place, got our water tanks all filled up and found that our tap water is filthy. I mean it comes out of the tap a pale brown and the more you pour into your containing vessel the darker it gets. If you let the water set for an hour or two the dirt all settles at the bottom. Nice. Not to mention there is no shower here. Okay. There. I’ve cleared the air on that one!

I’d like to refer you to one of Stephanie’s recent blog postings for many more details on the water situation here (see the link below). She has also had more patience than I have in uploading pictures so her page is simply loaded with photos. She was kind enough to organize this post for me here as well (hence the large number of photos).

http://journeysfarfromhome.blogspot.com

Every Drop is Precious

When we went to Ghana in 2007, I had no appreciation for a cold shower. But after being in 90 degree heat for a while, I have found that I really don’t care what the temperature of the water is. A “cold” shower (with water being something around 75 or 80 maybe?) is really not so bad after all. I don’t even mind that it’s just a trickle of water. Saves water that way. Stephanie, on the other hand, has been needing to bring some hot water upstairs to supplement the meager trickle of cold. Timothy also prefers the water to be a little warmer.

When you’re paying for every 1,000 gallons of water being trucked in, you learn to be a lot more frugal with water than you were used to back home. You don’t leave the faucet running while you apply soap to your hands, or when brushing your teeth. You don’t even flush the toilet after every time you use it. I know, I know, that’s completely beyond the realm of most of your understanding. But you have never lived in a place like this.

For one thing, you can’t take a bath in the water here. There are parasites living in the water, and if you soak in the water, you run the risk of getting some kind of bad creature inside of you. More importantly, you can’t drink water that comes out of the faucet. You will get sick if you do.

There are two kinds of water here. Board water, and water that’s safe to drink. Generally speaking, the only water that’s safe to drink is the water that you have sterilized yourself. The most convenient method is using these large 10 liter contraptions made by a company called Katadyn. You simply pour the water into the top 10 liter container, and then slowly, over the course of the day, the water runs through the filtration system collecting into the bottom 10 liter container. I think these run somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 or $500, including the filters. We only had to buy the filters as the McLean’s had an extra base unit here for us already. But the filters alone were something like $60 a piece, and you need three of them. We also brought a few other purifying methods, a “steri-pen,” some tablets, and a little water bottle (I think this is a Katadyn contraption as well). We’ve used the steri-pen some, although we will probably use the large filtration system for most of our clean water needs.

Then there’s “board water.” I don’t really know what that means, other than to say it’s analogous to “city water.” The McLeans do not get board water. For whatever reason, it is not routed to their home. Apparently, at our place, we do have access to board water. As I understand it now (this understanding is hazy at best), we simply “open the valve” and the board water flows into the 1,000 gallon container. Apparently, it can take up to thirty minutes to fill, but you have to be careful that it doesn’t overflow. Honestly I don’t have the foggiest. Now at the McLean’s house, they have a water reclamation system where any rainfall will replenish their supply. How sweet is that! And now that we are just about to start the rainy season here, they will not have to truck in water until sometime in December probably. I love being green. Did you know it’s illegal to collect rainwater using this method in Colorado?