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.
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