The ongoing saga of breakdowns and repairs in our little apartment continues! I’m not sure if a week has gone by since we arrived that something hasn’t needed to be fixed and this week was certainly no exception!

Late Monday afternoon, our power suddenly went off. Thinking that we’d once again tripped the breaker, I went out to the hall to turn it back on but discovered that this time that wasn’t the problem. Once again, Richard phoned poor Wendy, the girl from the school office whose job includes dealing with these issues. She soon called back to let us know that the caretaker wouldn’t be available until at least 8:00 p,m. The sun goes down before 6:30 so we spent more than an hour in darkness with nothing but our tiny pocket flashlight for light. When the caretaker arrived, he quickly discovered that our electricity meter had burned out. He didn’t have one on hand to replace it with so, not wanting to leave us without power overnight, he bypassed the meter and told us that he’d be back to replace it the next day. In the meantime, we’d have free power. That was five days ago and nothing more has been done! We reminded Wendy yesterday but at this point, we continue to draw free electricity.

Tuesday morning while we were getting ready to go to school, our water went off. We were less surprised by that because we’d seen water seeping out of the ground across the street from our building for several days prior to that and had noticed workmen digging there the afternoon before. When the water went off, we looked out and noticed that they were working there again and assumed that the water to our building had been turned off while the underground pipes were being repaired. Sure enough, a little while later, the water was back on and they were filling in the hole.

The heating unit on the wall of our bedroom/sitting room has been giving us trouble ever since we arrived. Though we’ve used similar units in both Japan and Saipan (it doubles as an air conditioner), we initially assumed that we simply weren’t using the remote correctly. The labels, like everything else around here, are in Chinese. Even after Wendy translated them for us, we still couldn’t figure out how to get it to work properly. Eventually, she contacted the company that made the unit and got detailed instructions for us. For a time, it seemed that everything was fine but then it started randomly shutting itself off and it took many tries to get it working again. That’s when Wendy convinced the company to send out a serviceman to look at it. Wouldn’t you know that it worked perfectly while he was here on Tuesday and that he couldn’t find a thing wrong with it! His only suggestion was that perhaps it wasn’t getting a steady flow of electricity. In this apartment, that’s entirely possible!

In spite of its temperamental nature and the fact that it can only adequately warm the room that it’s in, we’re blessed to have the heating unit. The only source of heat in many homes and most public buildings are radiators that, believe it or not, are controlled by the government! We’ve been told that this time of year is known as the hard season because even though the average daytime highs have been around 10ºC this week and the temperature still drops to less than 5º overnight, the government turned off the heat almost a week ago! Apparently, it was actually left on later than usual this year because it’s been an unusually cold spring. At this point, however, our classrooms, the university dorms and many homes are without any heat other than whatever warmth the sun provides during the day!

This week has definitely reminded us how fortunate we are to have heat, light and water most of the time and how much we take for granted back home in Canada!