Electricity

First night here we had some power. I actually woke up cold in the middle of the night (around 1 a.m.). Then about two hours later, awake, and hot. HOT, HOT, HOT. No power. No a/c. No lights, anywhere, in the house. I groped around for my new Nigerian cell phone and slowly made my way downstairs to where I could do some writing, since I wasn’t doing any sleeping at this point. I wandered into a downstairs bedroom and found a candle. As I worked from candlelight, I thought about how things were back in the day before we even had electricity. Candles were it. Or kerosene powered lamps. One thing you don’t realize about candles when you aren’t relying on them for light and you are not living in an artificially climate controlled environment is that candles give off some heat. Not enough, perhaps, to raise the room temperature by a full degree, if there is only one candle in the room, but enough that you notice it if it is near. Three out of the first five nights we were here were unsleepable, due to the heat. For me, anyway. Four out of those five were mostly without power. The sixth, we have had some power. Praise the Lord for his goodness. Psalm 107:8 says “Oh that men would praise the LORD for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!”

Recently we completed a bout of 60 hours straight without any electricity from the power company. It went out Monday the 20^th around 8 a.m. and it was out completely until Wednesday, 8 p.m. I don’t know which is worse, power off completely for 60 hours straight, or intermittent power. Correction. I do know which is worse, given the fact that the a/c in our room does not function when we are on generator power!

The generator they have here at the McLean’s house is massive (they call it a “32k” model). Must be thirty-two thousand somethings. It is in need of an overhaul. I can’t even imagine how much that would cost. And the cost for running it is prohibitively expensive to use for more than about three or four hours per day. Although you need about six or seven or eight hours of electricity per day if you want to keep the temperature in your freezer cold enough to keep meat frozen. Our generator will be on the smaller side, 6,000 watts.

There are two really weird things about the power here. One is the randomness of it all. One minute there’s power, the next, no power. Ten minutes later, or two and a half hours later, or ten hours later, the power randomly comes back on. There is no predicting when it will go on or off with any reliability. The other weird thing is for a room to be pitch black in the middle of a city. I mean, pitch black. Like a cave black.

After nearly 36 hours into our 60 hour blackout, something miraculous happened. God brought us a rainstorm. It dropped the temperature from 91 to 84 over the course of about a half hour. And let me tell you, that 84 degrees with a ten to fifteen mile an hour wind felt like it was 72. It was a beautiful thing. We all walked outside and basked in the joyful cold wave. Oh that men would praise the LORD for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!