Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Africa Part 8 - no electricity for a day and a half



Today brought us a day of doing chores – working in the library some more, and then we headed out to another missionaries house where we had dinner, and walked along the beach.  Today has been our first day of experiencing Equitorial Guinea (EG) without electricity.  We lost the electricity around 8:30 this morning, and as of right now, as I am writing this blog – 8pm, we still are without power. (The power stayed out until 3:30pm the following day – a day and a half without power).  Most missionaries here have some element of solar power in their houses.  For the house we are staying in that means we have three light bulbs in the house that are wired to the solar panels on the roof.  So, we have a bulb in the living room area, a bulb in the bedroom, and a bulb in the bathroom.  But – we were warned about the power outages, and as Honduras is prone to outages, we came prepared with two flash lights, two head lamps, and one small battery operated fan.  The primary difference between Honduras’ power outages and here in EG is that in Honduras we may be without power for as little as 30 minutes, and as long as 8 hours.  Only a few times in our 7 ½ years in Honduras have we had power outages for up to 12 hours – apparently 12 hours is the “normal” amount of time for outages here – lasting up to several days.

Tomorrow is our last full day on the mainland.  We are going to relax, go to a hotel that has a pool and eat lunch.  Afterwards, we want to take a last walk around the huge central town market where we will pick up a few souvenirs.  It has been a very educational and great opportunity of information swapping between us and the full-time missionaries that are here.

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