I just realized I haven’t mentioned the current electricity situation in Ecuador on my blog. My apologies.
We’re having rolling blackouts right now because Ecuador is simply running low on electricity. All the power here is hydroelectric, so because of the recent lack of rain (though the President’s propaganda machine is blaming it on all the past regimes) this is a measure to conserve energy and not totally use up what we have.
It’s a little obnoxious because a big chunk of the time that I have office hours built into my schedule, there’s not power here. My house is in the same sector as the office, so the electricity is always out in both places at once. This requires a lot of thinking ahead, particularly because my job involves writing (which I do on a computer, which needs power) and web updates, which involves more writing and communication (e-mail, thus computer, thus power). For instance, today I had a Quito Quest meeting at 9am, which ran past 11:00am, when the power was scheduled to go out today. That meant making sure my computer was charged, all my e-mails were sent, and everything I needed to work on was downloaded already. I then proceeded to go home, take a shower, and go to Supermaxi (grocery store) and lunch while the power was out, and worked on writing an article that didn’t require internet access to complete.
I won’t lie and tell you I haven’t complained a little bit about this, especially since there are days when I’m working at the Youth World office in the North with no power, then return to Lourdes’ house in the South just in time for the power to go out for three hours there. But really, I could certainly have it worse. Although it makes me even more behind on my blogging, it does remind me to be social and not spend my entire life behind a screen. It is a little funny though, when I get voice mail messages from home making sure I’m still alive.
Some vague updates on my life: I’m working on finally finally getting my completed Casa G article into a publishable format with some pictures and other fun stuff, and running with a new theme on my La Red article so that the writing portion of that can be finished this week as well. Tomorrow (Wednesday) my friend John Andrew (who has been working with International Teams in Guayaquil) will be coming up to Quito to hang out for a while, Thursday is Thanksgiving (obviously) so all of the Youth World crew that are in town will be celebrating at Laura’s house, then finally on Saturday the Jensen family and us three interns ‘s will be heading to Mindo for a short retreat. Hopefully that will mean lots and lots to write about, and that I will have some time to actually do that and post it.
