Monday
June 29, 2009 |
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Last Friday, a tornado touched down in
a town near my neighborhood. My family and I were visiting some friends
whose daughter graduated that day from high school. Suddenly, the sun
sulked and tucked itself behind a huge fold of clouds. Everything turned
grey. Then lightning streaked the sky, thunder roared and rumbled, and
the sky unleashed a storm of hail and rainfall. The storm was
accompanied by wind gusts that were later estimated at between 85 and
100 miles.
I had never seen a torrent close to this one in sheer awesomeness or the
howling rage of the wind. While I watched, in awe, from the safety of
our hosts’ living room, my kids and theirs dashed outside to harvest icy
hailstones the size of ping-pong balls.
The storm was short-lived; in thirty or so minutes its fury was spent.
The rain fell in calm pellets for some time – and then ceased
altogether.
Yet, even in her silence, nature was not done with us. Very soon, my
wife’s cell phone rang. On the line was a friend from our street who
told us that a huge branch from a tree on our property had snapped and
tumbled to the ground, cutting off a side street. Had the tree fallen
towards our house, it would have been disastrous for us. The friend then
informed us that every house in our area as well as a nearby mall had
lost electric power.
We hastened home to behold a scene that could have been from a civil
war. We were lucky that the wind had blown the tree away from our house.
An elderly Asian couple was not as lucky. The wind had snapped a tree
branch in half – and the bulky limb used their house to break its fall.
Another neighbor had a huge tree uprooted clean from the soil. The tree
leaned on their house like a besotted monster.
For more than forty-eight hours, our lives eerily echoed that of
millions of Nigerians. My family and I (as well as others in our
neighborhood) lived as most Nigerians live – without access to the
conveniences that are tied to power supply. Our stove being electric, we
couldn’t cook. We ate more meals at restaurants than we are used. The
milk in the fridge curdled up and acquired a faint stink. Refrigerated
vegetables wilted. Luckily, the fear that the food in our freezer,
cooked and uncooked, might go bad never materialized. We lugged our
dirty laundry to a Laundromat. At night, we made do with flashlights and
candles.
For me, the greatest difficulty was having no access to e-mails or to
television. For a news buff who likes to keep abreast of events in
Nigeria and around the globe, I was tormented by the blackout. I took to
calling friends in the U.S. and Nigeria to find out what was happening.
I could neither watch the (I was told exciting) South Africa-Spain
football match nor the dramatic final in which the U.S. sparred with
Brazil. A friend rang me as soon as the U.S. scored one against Brazil.
On finding out I was not watching the game, he did his amateurish best
to give me a blow-by-blow account. He was still at it when, to my
amazement, the U.S. flipped a second goal past the Brazilian goalkeeper.
I assumed the U.S. team was going to do to Brazil what it did to Spain.
Imagine my shock, then, when another Nigerian friend called me two hours
later and said Brazil had triumphed.
Since I’d come to count on regular power, its loss left me with a sense
of being adrift. It was, in short, as if I had slipped into a dream and
been transported to Nigeria. Had the outage happened when schools were
still in session, I would have been harder hit. How could I prepare my
lectures and seminars? I thought about our children; they would have
been lost about how to deal with the daily grind of homework.
My kids, wizened by their Nigerian experiences, joked that NEPA had come
to America. I told them that this, indeed, was a taste of life from our
beloved Nigeria.
There was a lesson in all of this. Our lives were disrupted by an act of
nature. In Nigeria, crises are all-too often man-made. Yes, it was
frustrating to go for so long as if trapped in NEPA-land, unable to do
the things one takes for granted on account of dependable power supply.
But the mini-crisis also showcased what it means to live in an
efficient, ordered society.
A cleaning crew arrived at 12:40 a.m. the night of the storm. Within
twenty minutes, they had cut up and removed the felled branch that
blocked a side street. Throughout the blackout, we could call the power
company’s phone lines and get repair updates – and their estimates for
the return of electricity to our area. Ultimately, power returned ahead
of their estimate. Nigerians could use a dose of that competence.
