7Feb14
Trying hard to tie up loose ends here in Haiti before we head north for a couple weeks.
Hopfeully, we’ll have at least 1 container on the land before we get home. Lord willing, it will be put in place tomorrow, though since it was supposed to be there yesterday, I maintain a cautious optimism only.
🙂
God will provide, and is doing a great job in keeping our spirits up. Everything tends to be more interesting here.
Thursday morning, I was greeted with a call from our neighbor, Ginny, warning me that the road to town was impassable due to a riot. Turns out, it was a good one too, burning tires, tear gas, etc.
As the day progressed, we found out that it was because a community group was mad at EDH (the electric company). Apparently, the community group had pooled together money to put their own transformer for their neighborhood to share so they would all have good power.
**Typical grid power in Haiti is very poor (90 volts instead of the 110-120 that is supposed to run through the lines), typically due to the fact that EDH overloads all of the public transformers to the point that everyone’s power is bad. Therefore, to get better power, you buy your own transformer and limit how many people use it, and you get good power.**
Anyhow, EDH came in this week and took down the community-bought private transformer and replaced it with a smaller one, so they could use this bigger one elsewhere. As you can imagine, the community group was upset, and that’s why they started rioting.
By the end of the day, EDH was making things right. I was glad to see that.
This highlights 2 struggles here.
First, that life is unpredictable, to the point that you don’t even know if you can drive down the street everyday and shouldn’t take that for granted.
Second, that it’s a uphill struggle to train up electricians when even the power company provides sub-par service.
But, tomorrow should still be the day to get a container on, and we will continue to press forward, as God leads and provides 🙂
