Forget politics, I just want a hot shower...

What’s more important, the daily drama of everyday life, or the bigger political picture? For the past two weeks, I have struggled to write the story of the student protests occurring in Mérida and how they have caused me to rethink my usual blanket support for student activism. The glitch comes from the impossibility in discerning a reality that I feel I can report, so I leave that post for another time.

Our own lives have been full of learning Spanish, losing a first tooth (Risa), making friends in two languages, and structuring what feminists call “reproductive labor”(what we do to keep alive) around the daily possible outages of water or electricity. Yesterday, Venezuela experienced a blackout throughout most of the country. Sunday’s a great day for one to happen, as people mostly relax anyway. New friends invited us to a birthday party at a pool on the other side of town, so the only change fell to Victor to negotiate our car through the intersections in which, in his words, “no one was holding the conch shell.” Without stoplights, things slowed down, but we didn’t see cars piled up on the side of the road. Everyone drove through the intersections super-aggressively at 3 miles per hour, resolving the problem. We won’t imagine how the hospitals and groceries stores waded through – hopefully, the generators went there first.

We left the laundry half-wet in the washer, since we had no water for the fourth time that week. I felt fortunate, as my friends in apartments have been without steady water for days now. This condition creates flurries of work when the flow is restored and everyone rushes to bathe, wash, and flush before it is turned off again. Sometimes, water is off due to infrastructural problems caused by heavy rains. Other times, the problem is local, as my friend’s apartment in which the contractor constructed an additional building without putting in more pipes.

You can imagine what happened when everyone got home to my neighborhood last night after a weekend of no water and a day of no electricity. In this, the chavistas and the oposición joined together. We fired up our necessary and non-necessary electrical appliances, quickly overwrought the electrical grid, and produced first a brownout and then un apagón total throughout the neighborhood. Anson wrote his school report on the battery of the laptop with a candle on each side. Risa chatted with me while I washed the dished by candlelight. I was so grateful that we’d made dinner before the lights went out! And to have water to wash the dishes by! Once again, my favorite Unitarian Universalist hymn runs through my head: For all that is our lives, we sing with thanks and praise. For all life is a gift, that we are called to use.

For my shower this morning. For a classroom with lights. For a coffee pot. For water and electricity, even some of the time, I give thanks and praise!