Appreciating the little things

So we were short for much of the last few days. Short on various things.

Internet:
We paid for an upgrade from 500 MB/day to 1250 MB/day, but the actual upgrade didn't completely work. Some of the problem may have been addressed, but in the process, our wireless router has been rendered useless. So only 1 person at a time now can be online (hardwired into the modem).


Electricity:
City supplied power has been available most evenings from about 6 pm until sometime at night. Sometimes, it's even until early morning, and at other times, it'll only be on for an hour or two.

The house is set up to receive power through a gasoline generator, but that has been at a repair shop since before I got here. We're hoping to get it back Monday afternoon. We also have a smaller gasoline generator, but there's also a gasoline shortage in Port Au Prince. More on this in a bit.

The house also apparently has a solar power supply hooked up to some solar panels, but we're not sure if it's actually working or not. It may be, and perhaps we're just using up that electricity fairly quickly.

Also, the house has a set of batteries that supply electricity. They look just like car batteries--about that size and shape. There were 6, which helped, but was apparently not enough for a comfortable reserve. (When the city power is on, we've been told that it will not only supply power to the house, but that it will also recharge the batteries.)

So, we had to really conserve electricity. Related to this is the fact that water is pumped to the top of the house through an electric pump. This allows us to have water available through the facets and toilets and showers in the house. So for a little while, we used buckets of fairly clean water for that kind of stuff.

Gasoline:
So Sd, our translator, told us that he heard that Port-Au-Prince (perhaps all of Haiti?) won't get more unleaded gasoline until April 23. However, diesell is still available, and that's what many of the vehicles and such use.

Unfortunately, the generators mentioned above run on gasoline (I guess there are also diesel generators, but that's not the kind we have). Also, the 2 cars we had for most of the week also run on regular gasoline. I found out that we're renting both cars, and that there's a car the foundation owns, an SUV Nissan X-terra that runs on diesel but that was in an accident, and was in the shop.

Given the gasoline shortage, we were pretty concerned. The lines at the gas stations were really long, and we noticed that the cars at the gas station weren't pumping gas. Sd explained that the gas stations knew that there wouldn't be more gas for a while, and so they had kept some in reserve. But they would only sell during certain very limited hours. So people were there waiting and hoping that they'd get a chance to buy gas later that evening.

More to come later, but that's all for now.