Sunday Morning Blackout

By Charlie

I rolled out of bed and realized that the computer was not charging. When the lights would not switch on, I realized the obvious: No electricity!

Weekend breakfast at our house requires three burners on the electric stove, plus the electric water boiler. Not to be outdone by a typical Mongolian interruption in utility service, we cooked up the usual three course breakfast and coffee on our one-burner gas camping stove. Coffee first, then bacon, then potatoes, then scrambled eggs. It was fine.

We spent a few hours thinking that the electricity would reappear at any moment, as it has after outages in the past. But no.

I eventually wandered downstairs and found my main man, Nasantoghtokh, looking bewildered.

“Tock baxguay uu?” I asked.

“Baxguay,” he said.

He said a few more things as we walked over to the – quote – Scene of he Crime – unquote.

And there it was – or wasn’t:

That snakelike imprint in the dirt and snow was where the building’s electrical power cable once ran.

Sometime last night, thieves made off with the cable.

They unspliced it here:

And here:

Before it was stolen, that cable ran from the top of this driveway, down to the garage.

You can see the neighbors gathered in this picture. Rachel is on the far right. And just downhill from Rachel, in the shadow, you can see what remains of the cable.

That one cable on the ground feeds three large buildings, so we trust that the collective angst of our neighbors will eventually get this fixed. Whether that happens today, tomorrow or next month is a question that we cannot answer.

Yes, dear readers, Mongolia is a country where people will steal 20 feet of electrical cable and think nothing of leaving a hundred families in the dark.

How can you like a country where this kind of crap happens all the time?