Tropical rain and electric fiasco

Today is another rainy day in Jarabacoa. Usually the rain is welcomed by all to cool us off and refresh the earth... however, it's been raining quite a bit lately so we'd really like to see it go. So here I am, sitting on my couch during lunch break listening to the sound of pounding rain on the tin roof and watching as it drenches the earth, leaving puddles all over our dirt driveway and watching the dogs perform "muddy-paw-print" art all over the white patio tile, and I thought that it would be a good day to write a blog.

It's been a peaceful few days, not to much out of the ordinary has happened, that is, aside from Sunday's 2:30am power transformer explosion. (Can you sense that a story is on the way?)

So there we were sleeping peacefully in the wee hours of Sunday morning when to our shock and surprise we heard a very strange and loud sound coming from outside. As we turned our heads toward the window we saw a brilliantly bright light, almost like fireworks. I opened the shutters and out by the street we could see sparks flying everywhere and a giant glowing yellow light. About 10 seconds later the light went out and so did our electricity. We laid in bed for like an hour afterward, just laying there. Neither of us could sleep after that, not to mention the room got a little stuffy without the fan on. About an hour later, much to our astonishment, the electricity came on, but only for about 2 hours, when it went away again. When we woke up later that morning, we were delighted to find that the electricity had restored itself once more. When we walked the dogs we stopped by our electric post to find the entire thing covered in black smoke and a rather important looking piece melted on the wet ground below. We were relieved to see that it hadn't been the fault of our neighbor trying to steal electricity again, but then we couldn't figure out what had happened. Later on that morning as we were preparing to get showered, we came to realize that, while we had electricity, something had happened to our water, as in, it wasn't working. So we quickly grabbed all of our clothes for church and shower supplies, and headed off to the base where we were able to grab a quick (but ice cold) shower just in time to get the group ready and off to church.

Now there are two things you should know about the DR: 1, customer service is not valued the same here as it is in the States; 2, Sunday's are a day when everything is closed, no one works. So, Josh and I thought we'd be without water until Monday when someone from the electric company could come out and fix the mess. However, Lowell, being the persuasive person that he is, got a crew to come out and take a look. It turned out they had to completely rebuild our electric circuit, it had been totally fried.

That was Sunday.