08/30/08

In the morning I worked mostly on lesson plans for class and then hung out with Gepson and Marc who were both students of Sonlight. Gepson now works in the school office and Marc teaches French in 6th grade. He also assists with bringing groups in from Port au Prince. It was good to hang out for most of the day. I cannot remember what we were talking about but we eventually Gepson started talking about steak. He was describing a ‘big juicy steak’ and then stopped and said, “Well, I have never had a steak, but I hear they are really good!” and then immediately breaks out laughing. Gepson is almost always laughing. Since neither of them have had a steak, we are going to invite them over one night. I had 6 steaks shipped in for special occasions so I am looking forward to getting our frozen food order from the boat!

A little after 5PM I went to check on the generator. It had been off since 1PM and some teachers thought it was turned off from 1PM to 5PM to save on fuel. I went to see when it would be turned back on and I discovered that it was being worked on. There are two large diesel engines here and one small one but only two can fit in the generator room at a time. One large generator is in the generator room along with a smaller one. The second large backup engine is not working. The smaller backup has a bearing going out in one of the rods. I guess it is knocking so we cannot run it for now. We will probably be getting some parts for it soon. The power was off for about 6 hours because there was a problem with a bearing in the generator and once they had it fixed (5 hours later) they turned on the engine to find out something was now smoking. Well, when the bearing broke inside the generator it caused a circuit board to break. The original problem was fixed, but no one knew the board was damaged. Once it was turned back on, the broken board caused another electronic part to start smoking so they had to shut it down again. Eventually, they salvaged a circuit board from the other generator and got it back up and running. We are running on the last one. If that goes, we are out of power for two weeks (until the next group comes in). Please pray that we can get by for these two weeks.