The power has gone off about 18 times today.

No kidding.

There is not enough power coming to the town of Batti overall and I’m sure the influx of westerners in the last few years (with our air conditioners, tvs and fridges) hasn’t helped.

Usually between 6 and 9 pm we can’t run a/c units, fridges, or more than a few lights and fans. There’s enough power for a computer, or a tv, or a few lights or a light and a fan. We’ve come to expect power outages daily now but this is ridiculous. It’s like someone is standing at the master switch for the whole town turning it off and on at will, just for laughs.

We have a generator at the office and it gets turned off and on about 5 times a day. Sometimes it’ll be on for most of the day, sometimes it’ll be on for 5 minutes. It’s quite a procedure. We all shut down our computers, turn off our printers, the fridge and water cooler and all the fans, then we turn off the master switch, turn on the plug in for the generator and fire it up. So…if it’s only for a few minutes, you can see we could easily spend our whole day turning things off and on. Needless to say, sometime we just sit in the dark for a few minutes.

Other weird things about power; each light is operated by its own switch and the plug ins have on-off switches on them as well. From where I’m sitting, I can see 25 light switches. There are 10 lights in my living room and (apparently) another 15 around the outside of the house! I’m so glad I’m not an electrician! When my parents were here, they made a map for me of all the switches. It’s been very helpful; I always check it closely before turning on or off switches. I never just flip every single one in the room looking for one bloody light. Nor do I sometimes blind myself in the middle of the night looking for the fan switch after the a/c has cut out…again.

I’ve included a photo of the light and fan switches in a conference room in a hotel. Can you imagine trying to get just the right ambiance in this place??

Also, the plug ins are often round holes about pencil sized. And some plugs have only two round pegs rather than the three that all plug ins have. So, to get past this “safety feature” we usually stick a pencil in the third hole, (the ground) so we can get the plug in. That off switch comes in handy sometimes.

Who wants to venture a guess how many times Scott has electrocuted himself in one day? I’ll offer prizes!