Let me be honest. My prose would be much better if I had
written this when electricity was out. In the moment. “Here I am sitting in the
dark,” I would say, “24 hours into the blackout, my cellphone is no longer
charged, and I'm now lighting my house with candles.” The truth of the matter is that I didn’t write
at the time because I wanted to save my computer battery for watching old episodes of
House and surfing the web. Priorities.
Yes, I suppose I could have written by hand, but I’m not
sure I could even find a blank piece of paper in the house. Last week, I was
trying to light charcoal without any kind of starter. I found twigs and leaves
and set them on fire under the charcoal. The wind came up and blew them all
out. I then shuffled through my house
trying to find paper I could use, but I didn’t find anything but books. Using a book as a fire-starter seemed like the
wrong thing to do on the day of Ray Bradbury’s death.
I asked Jacob to start the fire. The boy probably laughed inside.
He could probably start a fire by whittling sticks. 5 minutes later the
charcoal was hot, and 45 minutes later we were eating grilled chicken.
But back to the electricity. I was barely asleep in my bed
when a gust of wind came up the other night. My fan was on, the humidity
suggested that the rain would come. Rustling trees out my window and puking
dust into my bedroom, the storm moved in like a malaria-sick-thief looking for
a hideout. Water poured in to our living room, which, despite the work of three
different carpenters over a year, still refuses to exclude rainwater from
entering. Pull the dinner table back. Take the picture off the wall. Let the
water fall. Water, moisture, at the roots of decomposition. Maybe in 30 years
it will take away the whole house, but for now, I’ve just got to keep my stuff
safe.
The electricity cut. This happens almost every time it rains
so it’s not a shock at all. A few minutes, sometimes a few hours later it comes
back. Not this time. Would it ever come back? Minutes turned to hours, hours
turned to days. Ok, well, three days.
I remember visiting a friend in a village where they didn’t
have electricity. In front of her house farmers
sold cotton and her back yard was a cornfield.
It was serene, pastoral, and quiet. Sometimes oxen would pass in front
of her house, pulling another load of cotton, or corn, to the market or to community
storeroom. It was I expected the Peace Corps to be.
Her life seemed easier to me. In Tchatchou, electricity came and went. I
didn’t have a lamp or candles or even much in terms of flashlights. It would
fool me. We would have days, sometimes weeks without a single blackout. “Benin
has got things figured out,” I thought. Wrong. Bam. Ils ont coupé. You might remember an enormous blackout in
the US in 2003. Traffic jams, public transportation cut, a mass exodus of
people leaving Manhattan on foot by way of the Brooklyn bridge. In the US surviving off the grid seems almost impossible.
Living in Benin has made me realize that electricity,
water, cooking fuel, all these things are conveniences that have become necessities.
We take them for granted yes, but we end up with expectations that these things
should be available when we want them – 24/7.
In Ouidah, life might be considered simple, but when the blackouts start
to hit regularly after months of solid electricity, I can’t help but think
“maybe it would be better if I just didn’t
have the convenience in the first place.”
