The electric came on Monday afternoon. We are thinking maybe everything is fixed now. Think again. On Wednesday afternoon the electric went off again. Steve has a friend at the electric company, so he called him to ask what is going on and when can we expect electric. The transformer blew and it will be a few days before it is fixed! They usually keep a spare in the area – I’m thinking one spare for the Northern Province – but, it had been used and not replaced. He admitting to poor planning.
We Americans think – transformer blew, need a new one, put it on the truck tonight, it will arrive in the morning and install – right!?!?! Not so. The transformer had to be shipped from Ndola. I don’t know when it arrived, but the electric didn’t come on until Sunday at 3PM.
Life changes when there is no electricity. We went into survival mode. Steve got the generator going every morning. Our generator is only a 11 amps. So first he plugged in the coffee pot. Then when that was don’t the milk pasteurizer was plugged in. Then he came and got me so that I could enjoy at least one cup of hot coffee. Although, I think he turned the gas camp stove on twice in the day to heat coffee back up in a kettle. After that then the fridge and freezer were plugged in. We ran the generator most of the morning. Steve also plugged in the computer and tried to get some work done in the kitchen. He was trying to finish up preparing for teaching a Bible school class in Kasama the following week.
Generators are noisy. So in the afternoons we enjoyed the quiet! Then sometime between 4 and 6 again we would turn it on and plug in the fridge and freezer again. We would also plug in the TV and watch a show before we turned it off and hopped into bed.
We have a two burner gas camp stove that we cooked on. We also headed water on it to wash dishes and take bathes. Although I do know we forgot about it and our worker washed dishes with cold water. Steve did spend probably 4 to 6 hours trying to make it work right – the stove that is. Gas doesn’t flow through it properly.
I was planning Heathers birthday party for Friday night. She turned 13!! The party was to be at our house, but with no electric how am I to make pizza and cake. Our friends gladly helped us out. They were the ones invited to the party and their girls were staying overnight at our house. She has a outdoor brick pizza oven. It takes charcoal. So she made the cake in the pizza oven in the morning and then in the evening I brought over the pizzas and we partied at their house. Then we took the girls to our house.
There is so much that Steve does when the electric is out. He even helps or does most of the cooking. All this time we were without electricity, it was cloudy, raining, and we were having thunderstorms. So cooking on the porch wasn’t exactly pleasant, especially when the wind was blowing the rain onto the porch.
Sunday afternoon Steve is packing up to leave for Kasama and showing me how to do everything. How to start and stop the generator. What to plug in where. He even showed me how to unwire the pump from the electric supply and wire it to the generator so that I would pump water up into the tank.
I told him not to worry, that we would survive with him gone. He said he wanted us to more than survive! He is sweet. I told him, “If this was a class that I was taking. I would pass the test, maybe not with flying colors, but that I would pass and he was not to worry about us.
He left at 2 PM and the electric came on at 3 PM. For the most part it stayed on for the whole week he was gone.
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