I awoke to a foreign sound, which in itself is not necessarily out of the ordinary living in the jungle where morning animal calls can induce the feeling of having been transported to another planet during the night. Brin, who was clearly more alert than I, sat straight up and said "we should see what that was". After we investigated, it appears a bird landed on some wires, causing them to touch, which produced a shower of sparks and loud crackling that last 10 seconds or more, followed by the lose of electricity throughout campus. Instead of tripping a breaker, the wires had over-heated, melting the insulation off the wires where they ran through the wooden roof trusses of our generator building.
The story here is not just the interesting way we were awoken, but a story of God's goodness. After investigating the wires (being tipped off by the smoke pouring out of the generator roof) I am convinced of one thing, God intervened in preventing a fire. We knew going into this semester at the school that we were dangerously understaffed. That if something such as a sickness or emergency happened to one of the staff families it could have disastrous results for the rest of us.
This blog post was dangerously close to being a plea for help to raise money to replace our generator and metal shop building, as well as the 10's of thousands of dollars of equipment in the building. If that were the case, I'm sure we would be asking Why did God allow this to happen? In the same way, I find myself wondering why God didn't allow it to happen. Is He trying to communicate that He knows our situation and He will provide for us? That He's even in control of the birds that land on wires?
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| I was able to stay home from my work at the hangar in the morning and help get new wires run. |
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| The burned wires after removing them from the attic illustrates how serious this short circuit was. |
So what happens when there is no electricity during the scorching hot dry season in the Amazon? No fans in the classroom make an almost unbearable heat that much more unbearable, so most of the classes ended up meeting outside, or even in the river! Gabriella's science class (seen below) were doing some experiment which required them (conveniently) to jump into the water.
