When the lights go out

September 12, 2010:

No electricity = no light and no water. Luckily for us today was Sunday and we didn’t have to worry too much. Considering that Sunday is our day off, the chicos weren’t with us, some of the team had left to Pucallpa, and some of us girls stayed back. So when it came to make meals we only had to feed six people. Having no water to cook with made it a bit difficult. But since it was only us eating, we decided to finish the leftovers from breakfast.

In the middle of the day with nothing to do, we decided to have a kill fest. We removed everything from our dinner table and brought out the fly swatters. Bernie told us that there are 3 plagues: flies, ants, and cockroaches. Right now we are in the plague of flies. We were fed up with them landing on us while having lunch, so we had to do something about it. 1, 2, 25, 40… they were dropping like flies ha ha.

We were swatting left and right. With a hint of insanity in our laughter we were unleashing destruction on our first plague of the year. When the numbers began to drop we brought out prey to try to lure more. After a good 30 minutes we got tired of waiting for more to land on our table.

Don’t worry. We didn’t leave our yucky mess on the table. We swept the remains off the table and off our floor. We finished the clean up with a thorough wipe of the table. We made sure to use Clorox too.

To our dismay, the second we sat down to enjoy our clean table the swarm of flies began to fly in. We give up. The plagues cannot be destroyed, we just have to endure them.

With no water, no fans, and 100% humidity we were all bathing in our sweat. We yearned for water to bathe in and to drink. The little water we had in water bottles was diminishing fast. We had to make sure to ration it through out the day.

Later in the evening as the sun began to set we decided to play some volleyball. At this point the heat was leaving with the sun. We began to feel a little better.

For supper we had leftovers. Lauren and Rachel also treated us with homemade peanut butter oatmeal cookies. They were so YUMMY!

At night the Doc and others attempted to start the generator. Failure. So they finally ended up going to a neighbors well and drew up some water to last us for the night.

The fun was only beginning. In the complete darkness of our base Hanna and Caleb decided to do some experimenting with their cameras. Soon we had all joined in the fun. We had our headlamps out and we took many cool pictures in the darkness. There were many laughs and so many silly moments. It was the MOST fun I had had with no electricity.

Who says that you can’t fun without electricity. This team can sure turn a disaster into a time of joy J