When Simple Isn’t Simple

Those of you who have spent a lot of time in third world countries will understand exactly what I am saying, but sometimes it’s difficult to explain the everyday “simple” things about life here.
When I arrived in Candelaria at the beginning of February and the village had been out of power for over two weeks. The transformer that powers our section of Candelaria had blown, probably due to the fact that there are just over 100 legal power clients and more than a 1,000 others pirating electricity from the transformer. While New Song has been faithfully paying their power bills, most of the other clients have not. The power company refuses to replace the transformer until these debts have been paid.
I have now been living in Candelaria for a month and we are still without power with no end in sight. It’s not exactly that we don’t have power at all, but we have been living on a generator. The biggest problem with the generator is the cost. It costs almost $40 every day or every other day for gasoline to run the generator.
Other than the outrageous cost of gasoline, living on a generator has a funny way of making the simplest things suddenly complex. It has been hilarious to watch us find creative ways to make coffee in the mornings or to get things done without electricity. I am going to tell you a couple of quick stories just to illustrate my point.
The generator powers lights and fans in our house, but isn’t able to run much else. I am living here on the property with 7 other people in their 20’s. One night, after the youth left the property, we decided to have a movie night. No movie night can truly be complete without microwave popcorn. Making microwave popcorn seems like a simple task, but like I said simple usually isn’t simple. Kelly and Lindsay, two of the other girls living here, run through the house turning out every light and unplugging every fan so that the generator would have enough power to run the microwave. We were absolutely thrilled that the microwave worked long enough to pop 2 1/2 bags of popcorn before overloading and flipping the breaker.
Another night we realized that we were running low on gasoline and the generator would most likely cut off around 2 a.m. turning off all of our fans in the middle of the night. The first and most obvious solution was to buy more gasoline before going to bed so one of our guys headed to the gas station only to find that all three of the 24-hour gas stations in town had closed before 9 p,m.. So the next solution was to find the coolest places possible to sleep, run the fans while we fell asleep, and hope that the sweltering heat wouldn’t wake us up. I decided to set up camp in the living room because my bedroom has no window and thus no breeze. At first this seemed like a great plan. Between the fan and the open window, I was actually a little cold and needed to use my sheet. However, I had forgotten that a family of fire ants had recently set up camp in our living room. As soon as the fan stopped blowing, the ants came out and began biting me. I ran quickly back to my room choosing the heat over the ants. However, I still felt the ants crawling all of me. (That may very well have been my imagination, but it felt like they were everywhere). So, around 3 or 4 in the morning, I jumped into the shower to try and wash off all of the ants before climbing back in my bed, fighting the heat, and trying to get back to sleep for the remainder of the night.