It’s a funny thing electricity. It has become a part of my life that I take it for granted. If I walk into a dark room, I flick the switch and “click”, the light goes on.
The new ZOE Children’s Home is a great place. The home is settled in amongst the mountains. Though we have electricity, we are at the end of the line. ZOE had the lines extended into the area where our children’s home is located.
The disadvantage of being at the end of the line is that if there is a power outage at any point on the line….we lose power. During the current wet season (still 30 degrees -but with rain), this has occurred a number of times.
All of a sudden the heavens open and the volume of water that falls in the space of an hour is quite unbelievable. As soon as there is one of these significant downpours (in Australia we would call it ‘flash flooding’) then we lose power.
When we lose power, we have been able to run some of our services with the use of a generator but often have to reschedule things. Generally when the electricity goes out it is just for 4 to 6 hours, however, last Wednesday night the electricity went down and it was not back on by the morning. So when I went to work at ZOE on Thursday there was still no electricity. It was then that I realised just how used to having power at my disposal I had become.
We were making a promotional video for the upcoming ZOE Children’s Camp on Thursday, so when I needed some more light for one of the shots, as the room was too dark, I automatically went and got a lamp and plugged it in! Some time later I was in need of a coffee so I put the coffee and sugar in my cup, and then went to the water heater and filled my cup with lukewarm/cold water! Ahhh that’s right, water heaters and lamps use electricity!!!
You may remember our last camp. We run camp when the ZOE kids are on school holidays. The theme for the October camp is SPY KIDS. So one advantage of not having any lighting was that it created the prefect ‘spy’ ambience as we filmed.
We filmed it with my Flip video recorder (donated by Ben), and edited in a couple of hours…. I had to get it edited before my laptop battery ran out!
(video below)
Camp is shaping up well! I will write more about it as it evolves.
On the home front, we are thoroughly enjoying having Mel (Andie’s sister) stay with us. Andrea apologizes for her lack of blogging. As you can imagine, she has been busy showing her sister the sites of Chiang Mai and doing A LOT OF TALKING! Stay tuned- she promises she’ll write more soon.
David
No comments:
Post a Comment