Things were trucking along with the electricity until suddenly, they weren’t. A freak hail storm just happened to hit the road the only transformer station in the area was located, which not having internet access (the towers providing internet access apparently went out as well), we didn’t find out until later.
When the power went out, I had my son call and make a report. There was an option to report for the entire community, so he did so. The average repair time varied from 10 to 24 hours. I had just stocked my new fridge with perishables. 24 hours would be pushing it. I had no classes that day, so that was one less stressor. Eight hours later, the electricity finally came back.
During the interim, my son went to the corner store in another colonia near us. Here, he discovered the power was out all the way across town as the owner had gleaned this bit of knowledge from customers who had stopped in from various parts of town. He also confirmed that Telcel wasn’t working to add minutes to our phones.
Once I found out that it wasn’t just La Yacata that didn’t have electricity, I felt a little better about the situation. I was imagining all sorts of worse-case scenarios, including CFE coming to take back the installation that connected us to the grid because they believed “we didn’t qualify” or some such nonsense.
Well, less than a month later, the power went out again. This outage seemed to be localized to La Yacata, and the internet was not affected. The power went out 30 minutes before my morning class, so I had my husband haul a desk to the third floor of my son’s house, where the solar batteries had been relocated. It’s an unfinished room with no windows, so the breeze created a sort of vortex, but the internet worked, and there was power to plug my laptop in. I got everything set up minutes before class was due to start and then got a message that the student had canceled. Whew!
I sent a message to Super Prez asking him to call the report in. He did. The estimated time for the service call to the community was 10 hours. Dios Mio! That would interfere with my other classes. Fortunately, in under 2 hours, we were back in business, and I moved my laptop back to my office in the main house. Ahh, the stress!
These incidents made it clear to me that I would not be able to rely exclusively on grid power. The plan is to finish that upstairs room as an emergency bunker for when the lights go out so that I can scramble over there and teach my classes. It seems you have to roll with the punches when it comes to CFE electricity.
****
Want to start from the beginning? Check out La Yacata Revolution: How NOT to Buy a Piece of Heaven in Mexico, available on Amazon.
Surviving Mexico 