Before electricity

1 month down! (23 to go)
Today marks one month in site. It went pretty fast. I did a lot, although not that much work. But no one expects you to do much your first couple months, it´s more of a time to settle in and get to know people and your surroundings. I´ve had a few days where I felt really homesick or I felt like this is just really hard, but overall, I´m happy and positive.
The past 4 days have been really cold, well in the lower 60s/upper 50s probably, but it feels colder because there is no installation or heat, so it´s chilly inside, too. It´s warmer in town, during the day, but up on my mountain, it´s really cold. I´ve been sleeping in sweat pants, long sleeves, and socks, with 3 blankets. I don´t have a comforter, just some fleece blankets, so I just pile them on. And it´s going to get colder. Still, I´m really happy I won´t have to deal with a real winter, with freezing wind, and ice, and snow. This will be the first year of my life without snow.

Tuesday the electricity went out around 4:30 pm. It’s pretty dark out by 5:30 or 6, so we had to light candles and sit in the dark. Apparently a large region of the West was without power and they said there have been times when the power went out in the entire country. The power outage led to a really interesting conversation with my host parents.

I learned that they just got electricity in the community about four years ago. So then I asked what they used to do at night, since now they watch TV at night, but they didn’t have that a few years ago, to which they responded that they would talk, de-grain corn, and go to bed early. They didn’t have fridges, and they didn’t have iceboxes, since there’s no way to get ice, but there were some people with gas-powered fridges. Mainly they just didn’t have things that needed to be kept cold. If they killed a chicken, they would eat the whole chicken that day. Beef and pork they would dry in the sun or else smoke it above the stove in the kitchen to preserve the meat. Since there were no phones, the towns used telegraphs to communicate between themselves, Morse Code style. Then they told me that people in the community only began to get cars recently, everyone used to only travel by horse or walking really far, and they used oxen to transport. There are still many horses in use for transportation, but most people in my community have cars. My host mom said she was in 6th grade the first time she ever saw a car. And she’s only 34.

The conversation got more surprising. They explained how they didn’t have plastic cups or glasses so they used cups made of mud, or gourds, and they wrapped things in leaves since they didn’t have containers. My mouth dropped open when my host dad said that when he was in elementary school they didn’t have pens or pencils so they had to use feathers to write and they had to make their own ink. And he’s only 42. And I didn’t believe him when he told me that they didn’t have matches, so they had to start fires by rubbing rocks together. But he was serious. People carried flint around to start fires. And they didn’t even have candles, they had to make candles out of beeswax. I was really taken aback. Life used to be like that in the US, with horses and making candles, and feather pens, but it was like 100 years ago, not like 20 years ago. It’s amazing how much things have changed in the community in the last few years, since now everyone seems to have a TV and a fridge, and lots of other things.