Light & Power

Today I got an email at school telling me that there is no power at school.
No joke.
I knew that I'd been here a while when the news neither surprised nor upset me.
It's part of Mexico.

In the U.S., we have faith that when we flip a switch, something will happen. We trust electricity to be at our homes. When groups of people go without power, it makes the news. In fact, the process by which we teach our children to turn on lights and turn off lights can be a metaphor for our faith - bc the lights work every time we hit them, we learn to rely on them, and then our "faith" in the electrical system is built on a lifetime of trust.

That trust was lost when we arrived in Mexico. The power can go off, unexpectedly, unexplicably, for short or long periods of time. There is no rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes, when I hit the switch, the power works. Sometimes, it doesn't. Even when there is "no" power, sometimes a little bit of electricity can be milked from a hidden transformer somewhere and we can get enough power to flush toilets but not enough to run our computers.

This makes teaching at an American school difficult. I cannot count on copiers, printers, computers, televisions, projectors, speakers, microwaves, or even overhead lights to work regularly. There have been times when we taught school for a week without electricity. There have been times when the power went out in the middle of a lesson I planned with the overhead projector.

The power went out one of the first days of school this year, and it was a sign of my new "tranquila" or calmness that I did not freak out. I just kept teaching.