Blackout (9/26)

"Vrrrrrr....umphhhhhh...."(Sound of a dying generator)

Monday, September 26, 2010. First night of no power in Gunzi. I have been in other villages on several occassions without electricity but always with another Peace Corps Volunteer. This time, I was on my own.

It all started around 6:30 pm when the generator would not start and my counterpart passed my house to inform me we would be without electricity for the night. Some people from down the river would be coming tomorrow to hopefully repair the generator. So as the dusk turned into the early evening I lit a candle and made myself a Peace Corps meal fit for a nice candlelight dinner--peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

After finishing my dinner, I decided to call someone with a lot of experience in the dark (twss), my dear friend Craig Finch who lives 2-5 hours up the river from me depending on the boatman, size of the motor and deepness of the river water. I spent about 45 minutes talking to Craig--mostly gossip and I took a few jabs at the sad state of his San Diego sports organizations. After hanging up the phone, I texted him within 10 minutes with some random thoughts to which he responded, "All you do is sit there and think bout random things when there is no faya(electricity)". So true. I spent the next 30 minutes or so conjuring up some crazy, non-sensical ideas--still, none have topped the time I went camping in States and decided to apply for Peace Corps though.

At about 8:30 pm I decided to go and hang out with my neighbor, the Captain, who was all alone because his woman was out of the village. He was slouching in a fishing chair with his feet up on a little stool that we call a bangi while listening to the radio. I hadn't had a long conversation with the Captain in a while, recently we have just been borrowing things from each other and I have been helping him with his phone--that's Peace Corps's 4th goal: local cell phone repairman. Anyways, we had a lot to discuss. We talked about how the cleaning the village went and some of the other projects and work that needed to be done in the village. We also talked about his chicken coup which is 10 feet behind my house and smells real bad but I might get some meat out of that soon. We also talked about things that had happened in his life; he told me a story about trouble he had with a woman when he was younger and how the brother-in-law burnt down the Captain's house and everything inside it--his gun and bed. Apparently, even Saramacans have troublesome in-laws.

I left the Captain's house around 9:30 pm to go walk through the village and see what everyone else was doing with their Sunday night without electricity. Not surprisingly, almost everyone was sleeping. One woman was still up about and washing. One guy and his wife were running a small generator and watching some films on his flat screen TV. Yes, flat screen TV in the jungle, you read that correctly. The rest of the village was quiet and so I went back to my house and fell asleep a little bit before 10 pm.