Toaster Blackout Love

Len is a very helpful guy, and offered to take the kids to buy a refrigerator and a few other things while I organized a bit during our first week. There is a South African store in the city that sells AND delivers new appliances, so he decided to go there for the ease of delivery (otherwise we would have to find and hire someone with a truck to do it, and since we don't speak Swahili very well yet, this would be very difficult).

"The guy will be calling you for directions to our house, " he called after the purchase was made.

"Where do we live?" I asked from inside our house. I really had no idea where I was, other than the northern part of a large African city. Our house is about 100 yards up one of hundreds of unlabeled dirt roads I've seen here, and is surrounded by other similar houses.

"Just give him the main intersection at the roundabout." and we lost connection.

Well, I did know that we live near a roundabout. I didn't know that there are at least three roundabouts in this area of town. The names of the roads snaking from the roundabout were a complete mystery to me, as very few roads have signs or visible labels.

Soon the phone rang again. "LWIEEJHOEIMZOENWEUMDIDSDN?" said the delivery driver in Swahili. Now, I'm sure this gentleman speaks very eloquent Swahili, but I am still working on basic greetings and how to ask for prices three weeks later, and on this fresh-from-the-boat day, I couldn't even think of a proper greeting. It sounded like he was yelling the above phrase at me, and although I knew who he was and what he wanted, the conversation was going badly before I even spoke.

"Yes, asante," I started. You can't go wrong with thank you, right?

"MZURIEEBREE NGDOZEE" (note: these are not actual Swahili words, just what it sounded like he was saying)

"Are you the delivery driver? Do you have a refrigerator?"

End of call. He hung up.

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. Same conversation. Same ending. This happened two more times.

Finally, I found our house family guy, who speaks decent English and great Swahili. Approaching tears, I pushed the phone into his hand and asked him to answer it. I didn't understand anything he said, but about five minutes later a truck pulled in the gate and several men brought in our refrigerator. Thank you, Lord. Asante sana.

Another item Len purchased was a toaster. I am not a toast-loving person, in fact, I don't know that we have ever owned a toaster. Apparently, Len has been longing for one and so we kept it and set it up next to the electric kettle he also bought. A less overwhelmed person might have remembered that water takes forever to boil at sea level. I quickly came to love the kettle.

We were eager to test our neat little plastic appliances plugged neatly into a twin socket, and promptly filled the kettle with water and dropped a slice of bread into the toaster. Water boiled in less than a minute! When I pushed the lever on the toaster, however, the power went out.

Blackouts, we were told, are a common part of living in Dar. They happen frequently and without warning or a schedule. So we accepted that this was simply part of our new arrangement and proceeded to the next task on our list, and the next and the next, not really thinking about the blackout until we returned to a dark home hours later. Headlamps were distributed and I felt very rustic and local. We have no generator yet, and just assumed that everyplace we had been that day had a generator or weren't affected by the outage. Someone had even mentioned a blackout in our area. Anyway, we didn't realize until bedtime that we had just blown a fuse when the toaster started...Len figured this out and re-set the fusebox. He is become quite handy.

The defective toaster was returned to the store later that week. The woman behind the counter said, "It's not broken. I can fix it." and she pulled out a screwdriver and tools and took it apart on the spot, made some quick adjustments, and handed it back to Len. "It will work now."

When the toaster returned home, I was a little disappointed as I had secretly hoped Len would see the light and not get another one. He explained the lady's deft fixing and we plugged it in to give it a spin. Behold, it was healed. And as I turned it over to examine the settings, I noticed two small post-it notes from the counter lady:

"Want u 2b ma friend call me" and a name and phone number. We laughed for a long time.

I love that toaster now for providing us with so many laughs and I kept the post-its in my journal to provide additional laughter when I think of the day. Good medicine for the soul, it is.