michigan is evolving

Who needs to go to Africa? We have power outages RIGHT HERE in Michigan. This is the second time this summer. Is that normal? I don’t think it is. We don’t have power shortages here in Michigan, do we? I don’t think I’ve ever known there to be two power outages in a row (er, in three months), other than when they thought they’d fixed the downed power line from the tree falling on it during a thunderstorm, but they hadn’t.

Is it bad that I sort of like having the power go off? Otherwise things are so always the same here. Lately we can’t even get a good cloudy day to change things up, let alone a thunderstorm. It’s just sunny, cloudless all the time.

Last summer in Liberia, whenever I woke up at night to a thunderstorm, I would get up and stumble about the house, unplugging everything. Wearing rubber flip flops, of course. Cement floor conducts lightning. It was an instinct too strong to resist. I would try to stay lying comfortably in my bed, enjoying the storm, but something in me kept saying, “What if there is a power surge? What if the lightning hits something? It will be your fault if the fridge is ruined.” So I would get up, while all my North American friends slept peacefully on, secure in their (misplaced) confidence in the electrical system.

Then the electrical system in the office started destroying people’s laptops, and everyone got on board the “don’t trust the outlets” train. But still they didn’t think to unplug things during thunderstorms. Huh.

Anyway, we don’t have city water here in Boring Suburb, MI. We have our own well, as does EVERY OTHER of the 30 houses in the neighborhood. The result is that when there is no power, there is also… NO WATER!! Because the pumps can’t pump without power. This power outage we just had was just a tiny one, one minute or so (just long enough to reset all the clocks), but last time, when it went on for an hour or two, we had to do things like ration water. And stay smelly rather than shower. It was exciting. Relatively. For Michigan.

I lost power a lot in Rwanda. At the end of my time there, we had power for about 40 minutes a day. It becomes more effective to turn the fridge off, leave the door open, and store things on its shelves than to try to keep it cool. But for a long time, I didn’t realize that we also had water shortages, until one day, after living there for over a year, there was no water. Weird, I thought. That’s never happened before. So I used lake water.

But it turned out that there were water shortages ALL THE TIME, I just never knew because the backup tank filled itself automatically when the water was on, and this was just the first time I’d gone through the entire tank.

I would say that makes me a stupid, naïve North American… but the truth is that we had an extra tank in Liberia as well. I know all about them. But this level of mechanization! In Liberia, we had to go climb up a ladder and physically turn the tap on when the tank was empty, wait for the water to come back on, and then climb the ladder and physically turn the tap off when the little water tower tank overflowed. Many a morning did we wake up to the sound of my baby (at the time) sister calling, “Tower floating, Mama! Tower floating!” because she heard the water splashing out the top of the tank.