Day 2

Yesterday we had about 20 people over to the house for worship and fellowship.  A family from Mwanza was visiting and we invited a South African family who works in the Gold Mine that Brett randomly met in town one day.  It was nice to spend time with both our teammates and new friends.

As we began to fix breakfast around 8am and get ready for everyone to come over, the electricity went out.  Not such big deal as it happens often.  But I was fixing lunch and snacks for a whole lot of people, so it did put a small glitch in the day.  Then around 2:30, we ran out of water.  That makes the day a lot harder.  We get water about one day a week from the city.  We have two 2,000L tanks that hold the water so that we have enough to last until the next week.  Unfortunately, the city didn't run the water this week, so we ran out on the day when 20 people are at our house and with no way to flush toilets.  Alas.  Fortunately all these people also live in Africa, so no one really cared.

Usually when the electricity is out all day it is scheduled rationing and it comes back on at dusk and doesn't go out again for a few days.  Last night it came on at dusk as we expected, but as we did not expect, it went back out an hour later.  It's still out 14 hours later--day 2 of no electricity. So we've decided this is no longer a scheduled outage which means there is a problem with something, somewhere, and there is no telling when it will come back on.  We're fortunate to have a generator, which we ran a few hours yesterday and again this morning to keep our fridge and freezer cold.  If you read my post a few weeks ago, you know I have a large amount of meat in my freezer that I don't want to lose.

This morning Brett went to order a truck of water.  This is how regular an occurrence it is that people don't have water: there are multiple businesses in town whose sole purpose it is is to deliver water to people's houses when they run out.  I'm not really sure, but I assume these people have a very deep well to ensure their endless supply of water.  The first place Brett went to couldn't deliver it because their truck is in the shop.  The second place doesn't have their own water pump and we're going to have to borrow one.  The third place was the winner today--both a truck and a pump.  It costs 30,000 shillings (about $23) to have a truck delivered.  Not too bad.  We're willing to pay to be able to take showers, wash clothes and dishes, have drinking water and flush toilets.  The truck hasn't gotten here yet, but we have high hopes it will soon.  Until then, we drink coke.