I knew the situation had gone from bad to critical when Madeleine ran up to me and said “This is not helping with my hot flashes!”. It was already 11AM which meant that the temperature had already gone from hot to extremely hot and, consequently, it was not only the menopausal women on staff that were sweltering. Let us backtrack a bit here...
It was Monday morning. Ruth’s (our school secretary) habitual morning greeting of Goodmorning Dr. Lemoine was followed by the generator is not working...five words that would later prove to be the worst thing that, as school director, I would want to hear, especially on a Monday morning. The area where the school is located gets city electricity from dusk to dawn...any other time (meaning daytime), we’re on our own. No electricity = no lights (can live with that) = no air-conditioning (lethal). The school generator is our lifeline.
My first reaction to Ruth’s news flash was, ‘well, let’s switch on to the back-up generator.’ The school had just purchased a new generator last year, and had decided to keep the old generator as a back-up in case the new one broke down. Fine plan, if you bother to repair the old generator and bring it back to life so that it could be used if and when the new one broke down. That hadn’t been done. Its like getting an ‘emergency earthquake kit’ ready back home...you never ever get around to doing it...an earthquake happens, and you’re up the proverbial creek without your bottled water and your 72 hours worth of dry and stale granola bars that kids wouldn’t eat anyways.
So we ended up on this Monday morning with two incapacitated generators, and a weather forecast predicting, like usual heat, heat, and more heat. A promising day. Teachers made the most of their morning by moving their classes outside, hoping to find some kind of breeze, any kind of breeze that would be a point of respite to the stifling heat that was, by this time, omnipresent in their classrooms. The ocean waves, the geckos and lizards (yes, just found out last night that you went from gecko to lizard if you were more than 8 inches long and had yellow and orange spots on your head) scurrying around at your feet, and the occasional chickens and roosters (no one has yet figured out where these came from) doing what chickens and roosters do best during the days of their pathetic insignificant lives, walking around cackling, laying the occasional egg, and looking stupid. Luckily, our kids' habitual thirst for knowledge was not stifled by these minor distractions (yeah, right...).
Phoned up the company that had sold the school the generator and turns out the three month warranty had just run out a few weeks ago. Using the most diplomacy I could muster up (let’s not forget here, I’m sitting in a dark, dank, hot office) I cooly, calmly, and collectedly told the lady at the other end of the line that, the heck with the warranty, I had 50 kids and three menopausal women sweating here and I wanted a technician on campus in the next half hour, or heads would role because I’d phone the US Embassy and... Luckily, I did not get to finish my rant before the sweet-young-thing at the other end of the line said ‘Oui monsieur, notre technicien y sera bientôt’. I wanted to know how long ‘bientôt’ was; was it a ‘Canadian’ bientôt, or an ‘African’ bientôt? (not exactly the way I phrased it...).
The technician showed up half an hour later. Not too sure if it was the ‘US Embassy’ name dropping that got him here so quickly, or my comment about the menopausal women. Didn’t matter, he was here and perhaps we were in business. After 40 minutes of puttering with the engine, the fine young technician in shining armor, surrounded and with the unwarranted but I’m sure useful advise and commentaries from the dozen wise men guys-off-the-street-looking-at-other-guy-fixing-the-american-generator, got the generator going. Alleluia!
I thanked the technician, telling him that he was a life savior. He muttered something in broken French mixed in with the local Maliki dialect. I couldn’t really make out what he was saying; it couldn’t be good but I was so happy that I just nodded and continued to thank him. The twelve wise-men dispersed and returned to the street in search of other stranded people upon which they could share their wealth of expertise, the kids and their teachers returned to their classrooms, and the chickens continued to look stupid. All was fine until I returned to my office, and Ruth, who had overheard what the technician was trying to tell me, said ...so, our new generator needs a new fuel pump...
Post-script
Can’t believe I wrote a whole post about a broken generator! Although the saga of the disabled generator continued and the problem wasn’t corrected until Thursday, (for the sake of time and brevity) let’s just say that the recovery entailed a few phone calls to the US Embassy resulting in a portable generator being brought to the school, plus someone from the city sleeping at the switch on Wednesday morning and forgetting to switch off the city power to our area of the city for most of Wednesday (which saved the day), and a new ‘fuel pump’ being installed on Thursday by Soulieman, my new buddy the generator technician (yes, I’m proud to say we are now on a first name basis...well at least I call him Soulieman, he still insists on calling me Patron), with of course the invaluable advise from the same delegation of ‘street’ wise men, who by the way were really impressed when the new back-up generator on wheels rolled in from the US Embassy. Boy, that was a long last sentence. But then it’s been a long last week.
No comments:
Post a Comment