It has been quite hot and sticky here over the last few days and nights. Sleeping is a challenge. There has been a surge in power usage, due to air conditioners I would say, so many parts of the city have lost power. There is no pattern to the outages. In Monte Chingolo where our project is based, some shops have power and others none. I was in Palermo last night, which is a well off suburb, and some streets were powered and others not. There doesn’t seem to be a big fuss about it either. It appears to be the way things are and you just have to bite your lip have to put up with it!

We lose power every now and then in the venue. It hasn’t effected us too badly. We are using gas for cooking but we do have a fridge and freezer that up are plugged into the grid. We just have to be careful that we aren’t carrying too much stock in the fridge for when it cuts out. We also have a problem with the man who lives on site. During the night the freezer sucks the power and he loses light in his room, so he turns off our freezer. Not ideal, but he is a really nice 80 year old man who was here long before us. We are looking at ways around this. We might have pay an electrician to get a little more power to the venue. Worse things have happened!

We have had a low attendance on Monday and Tuesday of this week. I think the heat has had something to do with it, so it will be interesting to see what kind of numbers we have during January when it is hottest. There are two sessions to the primary school day here, morning and afternoon. There are many children in Monte Chingolo who only go to the morning session so that is why we have children for our project in the afternoon. Today was the breakup for the primary schools for the year, so we might have a few more mouths to feed tomorrow.

Ok, it’s time to attempt to sleep. I will post later in the week. Hasta pronto.