Our power and water went out yesterday morning. Now, usually, this is no cause for alarm. Utilities go bust several times a week in Remera, a consequence of poor infrastructure and limited capacity on the electrical grid and water piping system in Kigali. Sometimes we've simply ran out of Cash Power, the account to which we pre-pay our power bill. No biggie. Noting our neighbors seemed to be just fine on the power front, we sent Justin, our live-in house helper, to add a few thousand francs to our account.
Turns out this was a problem that no amount of Cash Power could solve. The power/water company had finally gotten around to shutting off our services as punishment for failing to pay a bill. From 2001.
Mmmmm. Now I'm not one to be petty with previous tenets, but obviously we've only lived in the house for six months or so. The fact of the matter was, our landlady had neglected to get her bills in order. EIGHT YEARS ago.
I came home from work as dusk began to settle on our electricity-water-deprived humble abode. Again, lack of water and electricity are a routine event, but the prospect of an indefinite lack of these luxuries loomed large in our minds. We whined a bit. We want to watch a movie. I wanna read. I was so excited to blah, blah, blah...
Of course it turned into a rather cozy evening. We drank ginger tea prepared over the charcoal stove, ate avocado with freshly-made bagels (a cooperative in the neighborhood has discovered the culinary bliss of boiled bread), plotted elaborate schemes to get our landlady back, and played cribbage by candlelight.
It was almost a shame when our plot paid off. Power and H2O are back, at least until the next "natural" outage, far sooner than anyone anticipated.
Perhaps we'll just have to shut off the lights again tonight, for fun.
