It was so amazing.
Steve finally got up here and installed the solar panel we bought in Nairobi six weeks ago. (This man is busy.) Steve is like a celebrity in the villages, so his mere presence created quite the stir, let alone this weird thing he was fastening to our roof. Then the homemade Kenyan ladder he was using to climb up on the room collapsed and he took a hard fall, so I’m sure that was even more fodder for the village rumor mill. (I won’t lie—my heart stopped when I saw him go. But he was fine. He’s tough. Iris told me today that the way he told her he’d ran over a landmine in Western Equatoria a while back began with, “Guess what I did today?” just as casually as if it was as much of a nonevent as stepping on bubble gum. Weird.) Somehow, though, no one mentioned it yet. I don’t know how it would be possible though for them not to have seen—the men on the mangott (the manly meeting place where they do nothing all day) are constantly surveying our every move.
Anyway, after much such to-do, he got a light hooked up in our kitchen. We all sort of stared at it for a while, amazed. You wouldn’t believe how incredible the idea of flipping a switch and having light has become to us. I mean, WOW. It’s just THERE. We didn’t know what to think of being able to see our food well of the shadows dancing on the wall. The village was similarly impressed. We could hear them stand outside our window and talk about it. The kids would just say, “light” in this really strange, E.T.-phone-home way. That caught us off guard, too, because it was the straight English word. I think the school kids taught them. I can’t imagine there being a word for “light” (of the electric variety) in Lopit.
We had a stream of people come to visit just to see this single lightbulb. I can’t believe it—we might be even more popular than before!
Kim really wanted her parents to see this picture. She’s so hardcore—a bush electrician.
Likewise, Steve is also hardcore. This is him, up in our bamboo rafters. Good times.
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