11/18/09

This past week went by fairly quickly. Monday and Tuesday were fairly busy with regards to the generator. John had shut one off early in the day because it was making a strange sound. After a few hours of work, he found out that an injector had gone bad and needed to be replaced. Unfortunately, we didn't have any. I had started helping around 1:30PM after my last class. Since we couldn't get the generator running we needed to start up the smaller generator. The small generator is a portable one which is barely enough to run our refrigerators, however we are grateful to have it as thousands of dollars worth of food would go bad. Since most of our food comes via boat we must order enough food for at least three months, but usually more to be safe. Everyone has a large supply as we cannot buy a week's worth at a time as you would in the States. On top of this, Norma has several deep freezers filled with food as she prepares lunch for 20 people every school day. Between the 20 of us, we most likely have about $40,000 worth of frozen foods including what Norma has for the school lunches. Without power, we would lose it all.

I had mentioned in my newsletter that two guys, Grant and Ken, came to work on one of our generators. After they left, both were operational. The newer generator which was limping along with some oil loss, was shut down while they turned on the rebuilt generator. The rebuilt engine worked fine. The newer generator would not turn back on after it had been shut off. Fortunately for us, had the older one not been rebuilt when it was, we would have been out of power a week ago. Well, it wasn't but a few days later and the injector went bad on the working engine. It's a fairly quick fix, but we didn't have the part. Without the parts, we found ourselves sitting outside trying to get the smaller generator to work, but it wouldn't stay running. We were a bit concerned because our two main generators were down and the little one wouldn't start either. The last resort was to ask Jerry, who owns the hotel next to us and who normally buys electricity from us, to power up his generator. Since he is already wired to receive power from us, we just fed the electricity back from his generator and through our breakers to our houses. We had to go unplug and disconnect all of the heavy electrical items. I had to disconnect our water heater, water pump, air conditioner, etc. The only thing we could power were refrigerators, one fan per person, and a light. This was plenty!!! As long as the refrigerators had power and we could run a fan, that's all I could ask for. Everything else can wait. I kept thinking about how funny it was to be purchasing power from a customer, but we were very happy to do so.

During all this time, we had scheduled a John Deere employee, from the Dominican Republic, come over to take a look at the newer generator. It was still under warranty. Fortunately, he was able to bring an injector for the older engine and was here within two days. We had Wednesday off due to a Haitian holiday, Combat de Vertierès, so it wasn't so bad to go without power. To be honest, it isn't all that bad to have school without power...at least for me. As for the elementary grades, it's a bit harder if they had a movie they wanted to show, but as for math, I don't really need lights since I get so much light from outside. Though we got the older generator back up and running we were told that the newer one had some major issues. We'll have to worry about that another day. We will repair it, but as for now, it's nice to have power again!