80 Hours

You know how in America if the power goes out for a few hours, it’s kind of a big deal?  Usually it is taken care of in a pretty timely manner, because everyone needs electricity.  It really wouldn’t fly if people were hanging out without the lights on for a day or two. 

However, it is a different story here.  We’ve had issues with the power since arriving, but we never expected to go 80 hours without power.  The power went out sometime Monday morning, and we didn’t think much of it.  We went about life normally, we watched a TV show on Amy’s computer, we worked on our spreadsheet of loan recipients, and we listened to music on Amy’s computer while we got ready.  We didn’t think that we might need to conserve our battery power. 

Every time we came home we kept hoping that the lights would turn on, but they didn’t.  On day two we found out that something had broken, and they said it would be fixed on Wednesday, which, figuring using African time meant probably at least Thursday.  After it wasn’t fixed on Wednesday night, Kennie came home and told us how sometimes Ugandans will climb the power lines and steal the oil, because it is very expensive.  Apparently it has happened a lot in the Katwe area, and the government said if it happened again, they wouldn’t fix it.  Our hopes of the power being restored were dashed, and we began imagining how spending the rest of our time here without power would be. 

But Thursday afternoon, our lights flickered back on and we all rejoiced. 

Also, this post is a little dramatic, because every night from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., the Rowe’s would turn the generator on, and we’d have light in our house, and we could charge all of our things.  It really wasn’t that bad, but we can say that we survived for 80 hours without power.