My tendency to sleep in isn’t quite that bad anymore. My friends and neighbors in Nyambaka know that I “faire la grasse matinée” (sleep in) on the weekends, and though they tease me endlessly, most people respect it and don’t knock on my door until at least ten.
Today is Tuesday, which means that my first class starts at 10:30, but I woke up a little after seven, due to the lack of power.
I have no right to complain about losing power, so I won’t. Many other volunteers, especially in the Adamawa region, never have it, and power their Kindles and other small devices with small solar panels, or they read honest-to-god books. I wish I could tell you that these people have learned to live a simpler life, or evolved past a need for electricity, but the truth is that most of them come into the regional capital twice a month or so to binge on refrigerated drinks and the Internet, just as I do.
Today is the third day we’ve been without power, and there’s no way of knowing how long it will go on. As is the way of the village, rumors abound. Some say that in clearing fields, a careless farmer burned down a power line. Others say that this was a planned outage. Everyone attempts to triangulate the scope of the outage and infer from this information how long it might last. We know that both Ngaoundere and Meiganga, the cities on either side of us, both have “lumière” (light), so we are to assume that it’s not a large problem, and should be remedied shortly. But then again, nothing is for sure.
The longest Nyambaka has been without electricity since I’ve been here was about a week, shortly after my arrival. At first, it was kind of exciting, even romantic, to live by candlelight after the sun went down, but as the days wore on, my electronics started dying one by one, as if a contagion was spreading amongst them. First my laptop died. It had done this multiple times before during shorter previous outages, so I didn’t fret. A couple days later my Kindle started protesting, flashing exclamation points on the screen, but with no source of power to revive it, it quietly settled into slumber. This loss was more inconvenient than that of the laptop, as reading is one of my daily habits, but I had a few books in the house, so it wasn’t an insurmountable loss.
Shortly after my Kindle began its hibernation, my iPod too told me that it wouldn’t last much longer, a frightening red battery hovering in the corner of the screen. After a valiant effort against the dying of the light, it also went dark, leaving me alone in the house with only a few books and my own thoughts. A terrifying prospect, indeed.
I’m fully aware of the privilege inherent in this statement. The only other iPod I’ve seen in village is one that a former volunteer gave to her neighbor’s brother, and reading happens exclusively with the aid of books, not e-readers. The sad fact of the matter is, I have yet to learn how to live without electricity, and more importantly, without some source of constant noise to distract me from my own thought processes.
I spent the following days reading voraciously and journaling, scribbling horrifying truths about myself that I wouldn’t have acknowledged if there had been any kind of buffer between me and my own psyche. It was a moment of great honesty, to be sure, but also of great doubt.
On our seventh or eighth day without power, I was walking home from the market early in the afternoon having just bought provisions for another candlelit dinner. A series of delighted cries of all ages came up from a group of small houses, and I heard small children yelling “Yité warti!” (“The fire is back!”) As I returned home, unlocked my door, and turned in the living room light, I couldn’t help but smile to myself.
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