Cutting the Power

So I’ve always thought that cutting the power was a strange saying. Especially in the South, people tend to say cut the lights and its never made sense to me. Well, let me tell you a little ditty that gives a whole new meaning to this saying.

Once a month, we get a knock on our door at an unknown time and an unknown date and an electric company worker comes to read the meter and give us an electric bill. If you are not in the house when he comes, well then you have to wait till next month. The electric bill itself looks like a receipt and gives you the total of how much you owe and then some strange address that tells the general location of your house. Our receipt says that we are close to the evangelical church.

Well, our receipt arrived on Monday—but with a busy day ahead of us, we opted to pay it on Tuesday. Paying the receipt is another adventure. Instead of just putting a check in the mail or bringing it to the electric company, you have to bring a check to the bank and wait in a line with the rest of Talanga who also received their power bills that same week. Last month, we waited for about an hour and a half in the line. Needless to say, it’s not an easy process. On Tuesday, luckily, one of our friends was already waiting in line and told us she would pay it for us.

And now about 5 o’clock in the afternoon rolls around and everyone makes their way home from Terrero and Tegucigalpa and we have no lights and a note in the door saying our power has been cut. It was cold and getting dark so we called our life line Fatima who told us to call the power company. Since the address that I mentioned earlier is sort of vague, the boys took it in turns standing on the corner outside our house looking for a passing electric company truck. After about an hour or so, the worker arrived and asked where the power had been cut. Confused, we told him we weren’t exactly sure and so he looked up to the power pole outside our house and pointed to two wires that had obviously been cut. Now I’m not using cut figuratively. Someone (apparently from a company in Tegus) had come along with a pair of scissors and cut the wires. Telling us that he needed a long ladder, he left to return later to somehow sort of tie the wires back together and restore light to our humble abode.

In conversations with many people across Talanga, countless houses lost power with us and very few seemed to understand why the power company was being quite so strict. But, now we know to pay our electric bill on the same day and why people use the saying ‘cut the power.’