4th August 2009

P, a friend I have done lots of volunteering with in the past, arrived in Lalibela yesterday morning, and I’ve already put him to work! He did get some chance to relax on Wednesday afternoon, but first thing Thursday morning he was in the car with us, on the way to summer school where he worked with A (and many members of the community who got involved) to put up football nets in our school compound. He’s actually going to be writing some entries for this blog for the next few weeks, giving his impressions of Lalibela and talking about the things he’s doing here.

Of course, that’s only if we have power. The power went off on Tuesday night and the next morning there was an announcement that the whole of the Amhara region was going to be without power for 15 days. 15 days! People started rationing the batteries on their mobile phones and think about who they know who has a generator. There were many theories about what had happened, the most popular one being that there was a fault around 150kms away which was affecting our suppply, but others said it was do with power surges and ‘crowding’ (I have no idea what that means). Of course, we all had to guess this because nobody official actually gave us any information.

However, as Aman and I optimistically suspected, the power came back around 3 days later, at about 6 in the evening. I think P was a bit bemused by all the cheering, shouting and clapping (espcially as it had woken him up from a nap!) but the celebration when the power comes back on is my favourite part of the power cuts. When the power was only out once a week (ahh, the good old days!) I used to know when it came back on, even if I’d gone to bed, because the whole of Lalibela would be filled with cheering when the lights flickered back on. Now the power doesn’t come back on til the early hours of the morning and everyone’s asleep, so there’s no cheering.

We have the power back, but now the water’s gone off. Hey ho, can’t have everything!