Seriously

I have spent this week wondering just how long I can ‘live’ in a house that has all the stuff wrong with it from the previous ‘house’ entry, plus these, without going insane:

- Airconditioning broken (worked fine at the old house! How hard is it to uninstall and reinstall an airconditioner without breaking it?)

- Unuseable gas stove. It worked fine at the old house. Somewhere in transit it lost all its gas, so I got the bottle refilled (this took a whole day fitting the epic journey around work). But then I discovered it might have a leak. So now I can’t use it until I find someone to check it out (and there may not actually be a person in the whole of East Timor who has the skills or the tools necessary, so wish me luck).

- Water mysteriously off for two days straight.

- Kitchen light which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. (The kitchen door doesn’t lock either, and that is more serious than it sounds because the kitchen is a separate hut here, but I have resigned myself to this one; I say, good luck to anyone who wants to steal my plastic plates.)

- Blackouts around 7 each night (so you have to start cooking dinner as soon as you get home from work if you don’t want a blackout halfway through). I’ve learnt to strategically place candles around the flat, leave the matches / lighter in the same place, keep the torch with me at night, etc.

- Lights which sometimes flicker and refuse to be on – so that I race out and buy new fluorescent tubes – but then work perfectly well the next day, so that I wonder if I should bother changing them after all.

- ONE powerpoint, let me repeat that, ONE powerpoint for the entire flat – which is approximately four inches from the ceiling in the corner where the bed has to go. I know I’ve mentioned this one before, but I just want to emphasise that I have a 6-outlet powerboard dangling above my bed because of this.

- Oh, and my phone has decided to stop working properly (still get prank phone calls though – great) – so I have to go to Timor Telecom sometime to get that looked at.

Oh. My. God. I’ve had people to look at the airconditioner, and it seems to work now... sort of. Just have to concentrate on getting one item fixed at a time (it is madness to expect to be able to do more than one chore in a day in Dili).