Friday, October 21, 2011
Power, no power, power, no power, ah the joys of living in Congo. Take a few minutes and think about your daily routine. Throughout your day, what requires you to have electricity? How much do you use? Now, how would your day change if you were to loose power? Now, likely you could still make it through your day, (right?) it just makes things a little more difficult!
Since moving to Lubumbashi, the adjustment to power has probably been one of the strangest adjustments we have had. In Kigali, there were times we lost power, but the infrastructure was pretty good, that for the most part it was only for a few hours at a time, and it rarely was ever a daily routine. I have shared about our first house and how the voltage was extremely low, so every night the power would shut off right in time for dinner, so we were likely eating by candlelight every night. (Which is really romantic for about 1 month…then it’s just annoying)! Since we have moved into our new house it has been a really great transition. Thankfully in this new house, there was has only been 1 time that the power was off longer than 24 hours, but with the back up generator, we no longer have to worry about food spoiling.
It’s funny how much our routine changes from day to day! I have always been a person who enjoys “routine”, but if I plan to do laundry on Tuesday’s then it will likely mean that I won’t have power, so instead of living by routine, I have learned to adjust to doing things one day at a time, as the power is available. Sometimes I even will make dinner at 3pm just because we have power. It seems like if I have prepared something for dinner that needs to be baked, the power shuts off just in time for the oven to be pre-heated! Or, if I plan ahead and make a breakfast casserole, the next morning the power is out, so we can’t bake it.
Think about it! How many times have you had to regularly plan 2 options for every meal, “just in case” you can’t make the 1st option? Before moving to Africa, I always took for granted that we live in a place of such strong infrastructure, that unless there was a storm or some other random reason the power lines were cut, you always had power. I didn’t even realize you should always be prepared with “options”, until we moved here.
There was one evening that I was making a pizza, breadsticks, and a cake. I started dinner early, knowing that we currently had power; the cake was halfway cooked when the power went out. It came back on within 30 minutes, with enough time to finish my cake. The power ended up turning off and on 4 times that night, and we didn’t end up eating dinner until well after 8pm. It never is that big of a deal and we have learned that the power is likely going to go out at some time in the day, and it’s likely going to happen when we least expect it, but every time the power goes out our first reaction is, do you think it will come back on tonight? Let’s just say, I don’t know if we will ever fully adjust to the power problems in Congo. But yet, at the same time, maybe we already are. I no longer stress when the power shuts off. I just continue with the next thing on my schedule, knowing that I will eventually come back to what I was doing. It’s just an interesting adjustment, one I did not fully prepare myself for, when we left for Africa almost 2 years ago. I feel like everyday we are learning something new about life and living in Congo, and everyday we go to bed saying, huh…today was an interesting day!