Day 12 without electricity: Change of scenery

The past twelve days have been a learning experience for me.

(Short background: my power is connected somehow to the middle school down the street, which usually works out fine, except for when the person responsible for paying the bill each month is out of town since there are not classes right now. So when the bill doesn’t get paid their power gets cut, and my power gets cut.)

My postmate who lives without electricity never at his house has been teaching me the ways of passing the time and where to charge your computer (and how to not feel guilty about mooching off other people’s power).

And, as the saga of the electricity being cut at my house continues so has the saga of the work that I need to get done on my computer. (Volunteer Reporting File, Gen Eq committee blog, looking at pictures of my nephew being adorable), so I set out this afternoon to find a new place where I could cross some things off my to-do list and maybe squeeze in an episode of The Wire.

I found my new location, as I figured I would, at my host father’s house, but I also turned down an offer from my neighbors (who had already been far too generous with their power) and avoided the bar where I usually charged because I can’t spend all my time drinking beee while I wait for the orange light on the power cord to turn green.

We talk a lot about community integration, but I didn’t realize how integrated into my community I was until I’ve been able to have a fully charged cellphone and a laptop and a iPod for the past 12 days, even though I come home and cook by flashlight.

My new workplace has plastic lawn furniture tables and chairs, all the yams I can eat and a rotating group of about seven children who come stand behind me as I type. And, after an hour and 27 minutes, a fully charged computer. 

Office space

During college, I spent two summers working in demanding, albeit not challenging, desk jobs. Jobs where in-office catastrophes included things like employees taking an 11-minute instead of 10-minute break and paper boxes that were not correctly stacked. Jobs where I had to drink a second cup of coffee in the afternoon in order to fight falling asleep from boredom. I was crabby and tired. I lost my summer and a relationship over them. I did it for two summers and vowed never to allow myself to be that person again. 

I now have the most demanding full-time job that I most likely will ever have. There are many times when I feel like every exchange with a neighbor, Mama selling rice and beans or motorcycle taxi driver is a job performance evaluation. Every conversation in a local language. Every time I run (literally) down the street. The times I rarely don’t feel like this are when I’m alone in my house. (Although then I am concerned my neighbors are counting the amount of time that I am in my house.)

I thought about this yesterday as I walked down the street to visit some of my colleagues. I thought about how it’s hard to think about my colleagues as friends instead of colleagues. Every time I visit with someone at their house (never take the power of dropping by someone else’s house for granted in the Beninese cultural context), it’s hard to not think of it as a work engagement. When I leave it’s hard to think of it as me being able to cross something off my to-do list for that day.

But also, as I walked away from one of my friend’s house yesterday, I thought about how much this job is always what I wanted if stopping and talking to friends is part of my job’s to-do list for the day. I spend my workdays biking and saying Hi to people and making kids laugh and playing soccer with my students. 

My break room is my tailor’s house. My water cooler is the cashew tree in my school’s courtyard. My cubicle is my entire village. I work 24/7, but it beats my days of office politics and presentations on time theft.