Just a wee fire.

Just when I thought things were getting a little "normal" around here, we had a tiny adventure last night. We had just finished eating our supper when the lights suddenly went out. Normally, when the lights go out, the guard (or someone close to the generator shed) will wander over to the generator shed and switch on the generator (that is, if it happens to be during the prescribed hours of electricity).

Last evening, when the lights went out, I made my way to my bedroom to get my solar lamp, which was still on the bedside table from the previous night, when the electricity was also off. Once in my bedroom, I happened to see an odd orange glow coming from the direction of the generator shed - only about 30 feet away from my bedroom window. I also heard something more alarming, "Fire"!

Yup, that's right. Our generator shed was on fire!

Well, thankfully, it wasn't all as dramatic as that - one of the meters that measures the incoming city electricity had caught fire and was starting to spread to the surrounding meters (um, don't ask why we have so many meters!).

Thankfully, too, Matt happened to see the fire pretty much as soon as it started and had the quick thinking abilities to switch off the electricity and put out the fire before the shed itself caught fire. On the other side of that little plywood wall, by the way, is our compound generator, with it's 200L diesel tank, as well as 3 barrels full of extra diesel fuel!

I'm really thankful the whole thing happened before 8pm, rather than, say, at 3am, when we would all have been tucked in our beds, and wouldn't have known anything was on fire until we started hearing the fireworks! So really, the Lord was protecting us last night.

I'm also really thankful that this happened when Matt is around, as he rigged something up so we could still have electricity today, even though bits of the whole system are rather melted and burned beyond repair.

So that was a little excitement last night.

Today, though, was honestly mind-numbingly boring! I was at a meeting, stuck in a room for the WHOLE day, with a bunch of people who were saying the same things over and over again that they've been saying for the last few years. One of the challenges with some of the work that I do here is the face that there's a very, very high turnover rate in personnel... both in government departments, in NGOs and in the UN agencies. So someone comes, sees the situation, talks about the situation... and then they go. Then someone else comes to take their place. They see the situation, they talk about the situation... and then they go. And so on. So I feel like very few people stay long enough to actually DO anything about the situation. They just come and make some pronouncements, thinking they've seen something new, because it's new to them, and then they go before they understand the situation well enough to do anything useful about it.

So I was a little frustrated at this meeting today. But I did get the opportunity to stand on my soapbox for a few minutes, and there was one woman from USAID who we've been talking to for the last several months on and off... and something that she said actually did give me a glimmer of hope for something in our area to take off. So I just need to keep looking at those little glimmers of hope, those little carrots that get waved at me through all the rest of the proclamations that get made!

Plus, they had some really good chicken wings during tea time! Chicken wings in Jb! Honestly, we've come a long way in the past three years. However, I was starting to wonder if I'm turning into some weird cat-lady, because all I could think about while seeing all those people eating all those chicken wings was, "I wonder how many bones I can stuff in my purse for Zane..."