Electricity!

Please note that VSO is in no way connected with or responsible for the content, comments and observations in this blog: these are solely my own in a personal capacity.



Generator Saga - continued



Sunday, I got a lift home from Butare with Déo my moto driver. He had tried to buy petrol in Butare but all the stations were closed. When we got home I said I still had three-four litres in the jerrycan as not all the 16 litres would fit in the generator. He was very grateful!!



Three hours later he knoecked on my door. He had got about four hundred metres from my house when his motorbike seized up. He had to call a friend in Butare with a pick-up to drive out and collect him. It turns out the petrol was mixed or contamined with diesel (or maybe it just was diesel). He had to get the garage to strip down the engine and clean the tank and carburettor before he could get moving again.



Woops - couldn't help feeling a bit guilty. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished. I had to get Antoine out Monday to strip the generator, wash out the tank and carburettor with clean petrol and reassemble the generator. He found the spark-plug had either died of natural causes or had been affected by the diesel/petrol so he had to cycle into Butare the next day and get one. That was today. So this afternoon, when I got home from work, I figured there was just about enough petrol left in the generator to boil a kettle. And so there was. I made a Cauliflower and Broccoli Cup-a-Soup (two packs) and a flask of coffee for tomorrow's breakfast - the generator died JUST as the kettle came to the boil! Boy, did that soup taste good!! But where the hell am I going to get petrol?



Of course there is also the question of the RWF16,000 I paid for 16 litres of something that turned out not to be petrol. I will need Enoch to come along as my faithful translator as I know they don't have any French. I wonder if it was actually diesel and they just misunderstood what I was asking for? In that case they might take it back and replace it with petrol - we'll see. #


Work is manic again. We finally got the English classes started today - sort of. Only eight of my 20 turned up and only 3 of Enoch's 22 so he couldn't even get started. I hope more come tomorrow because I am getting a bit fed up leaving my work in the Education Office every day and hiking over to the District Office for classes that either don't happen or so few turn up for it is virtually pointless.



On the good side, I got all the staff lists for the entire district finished and sent off and tomorrow I will start on the exam results that have just arrived. This will give me a better idea of which schools I should visit first once I fianlly begin inspections.



Sorry - rather boring and uneventful blog tonight - don't have a lot of energy either in the computer battery or in my brain! Will fill you in later on my weekend in Kigali, the family dinner and all that!! And my ideas for projects, musn't forget those!