I received the following message from one of my Spanish tutors who lives in a jungle town in Ecuador:
Hola David!! quería preguntarte si es posible que podamos tener la lección del lunes en la tarde? es posible que no tenga electricidad en la mañana!? avísame por favor gracias ?
Basically she is asking if we could have our scheduled lesson in the afternoon rather than the usual morning as they do not have electricity during that part of the day.
I talk with this young lady every two weeks for conversational practice, and have been doing so for years. We almost always have interesting conversations, even with her frequently playing Devil’s Advocate to almost any fact or opinion I express. One would think she was one of my kids.
This is a new issue with her, not having electricity 24/7. Two weeks ago she had to use her cell phone for the lesson on Skype. That works, but is a bit clumsy for what we are doing. The problem is that all the electricity in Ecuador comes from hydroelectric plants, and they are in the middle of massive, extended, never imagined drought that has dried up all the rivers. It is a country wide problem.
I worked for about a year with a young lady you lives in one of the larger cities of Venezuela, Maracaiba. She frequently did not have electricity or Internet, occasionally losing it in the middle of a lesson. The problem there is decades of a corrupt, incompetent government, and wide spread poverty. Apparently, it is not uncommon for folks to knock down electric lines to steal the copper! She told me a story one time about how you had to be careful driving as people were stealing manhole covers to sell for scrap. Her life there in many ways seemed like something out a Mad Max movie.
Central America seems to have fewer problems with electricity, but a few times my teachers there have been operating their computers off of external batteries.
While we have electricity outages here, they are rare, and certainly not something happening daily, usually being outages associated with weather events.
Just remember how blessed you are next time you flip a light switch or turn on a faucet with potable water.
We are quite blessed. Did you see the local news fairly recently (I forget which area, but am thinking south) where someone was stealing wire and causing electrical outages?