09/21/08

This morning I started the day by getting ready for church and was frustrated at how difficult things are when you have no electricity. I was amazed at how nothing outside of my home seemed different. No one else had to slow down since most Haitians don’t have electricity to begin with. They aren’t affected at all and came to church dressed up without any problem. It was just a reminder of how blessed we are and how easy our lives can be. Amazingly, you can really continue with everything that is important even when we lose what we consider a necessity.

After church, there wasn’t too much to do other than make sure that we kept all the refrigerators going as well as our water supply. The small generator isn’t strong enough to power everything so we had to work in stages. Roger, along with some of the other missionaries, spent most of his day keeping everything working. For starters, our water tower holds 5000 gallons of water and since the power is out, it doesn’t keep filling automatically. In order to fill it, we have to pump water from the well up to the main reservoir. This has to be done in stages since the generator cannot run all pumps at once. So, Roger needed to fill the reservoir from the well, then he switched the power and pumped water from the reservoir to the water tower so we could still have running water. After this, he reconnected the power to the grid so our refrigerators and freezers would work. This process will be ongoing until the main generator is fixed. Fortunately, we have a pretty good community here and try to work together. Since some people have stoves/ovens that are electric and some of us have gas powered stoves we have been trading “showers” for “food”. Some people come over to use our stove while we go over to their place to take showers. It works out pretty well!