It’s been a while since I thought about the time I spent visiting Honduras…but it was an interesting stop on my train of thought.
It all started as I was thinking about which HAM radio I would want to buy, once I’ve saved up enough money to buy one of the two I was considering. One model is the “everything I could possibly want, in a single unit, one-and-done purchase”, and the other was so much less expensive that I could buy it…and three other radios to make up the feature difference.The expensive unit has an integrated battery, so when comparing it with the ‘hodgepodge alternative’, I considered whether it was worth getting a new battery, too. That made me think about whether I’d actually be using it in a power outage…because for that to happen, I’d need to have a power outage. Where I live, we’ve lost power for less than 20 minutes over the past year.
…it was that thought which brought my trip there to mind. While there, my AirBnB was out of power for nearly three hours one day. There was no storm, no earthquake, no other natural disaster. To my knowledge, there was no civil unrest, transformer malfunction, scheduled maintenance, or necessary rationing. The power…was just out. The people I interacted with there basically said, “yeah, that’s a thing that happens. It comes back eventually.” …and, they were right.
The last power outage I had at my complex was about ten minutes, around 10PM…and it was pretty visible that lots of people in the complex were walking around their homes with flashlights; many went outside to look around, as I did. Nobody likes paying their power bill, but credit where it’s due – a ten minute outage is so irregular here, that it is enough to cause uneasiness. A three hour outage there is met with the response of “…in other news, Pope found to be Catholic”. It’s a fundamentally different mindset and societal alignment, and while it didn’t impact me, it did make me wonder whether American society would be better off if the power grid had an 80% uptime, rather than the 99.9999% we’re used to.
While my experience in Latin America has been limited to just a few weeks of my life in total, and while those experiences had a generally-modern slant to them, it was still distinctive. I don’t truly have enough data, but I think there must be at least a correlation, if not a causal link. From what I can ascertain, the people of Honduras perceive a multi-hour power outage the way Florida perceives a tropical storm, or the way California perceives a 4.0 earthquake, or the way Michigan perceives four inches of snow.
There is something powerful about the lack of dependency, and that ‘something’ is the combination of patience, perspective, and the ability to be perfectly fine doing something else, even when the power is out…because everyone around you is in the same boat. People there still seemed to know their neighbors and have positive relationships with them. Every few blocks, there seemed to be a pulperia (a tiendita in Mexico), which US zoning law basically forbids, but was clearly a source of social gravity within the neighborhoods. This seemed to ensure everyone recognized their neighbors, something seemingly absent from life at home.
Of course, there is an element of rose-colored glasses to be had here; my profession – and my computer-centric hobbies – are basically impossible without reliable power. This isn’t a problem when traveling, because I’m not conjuring up server software while visiting friends and family. It would, however alter the sorts of things I do, and how I do them, if I were subject to rolling blackouts on a weekly basis. I am grateful that I do not have any medical ailments which require appliances or temperature-controlled medicines for my health, but the day may well come when I experience those things, which require far more individual infrastructure in such a scenario. Surely, the people who live through regular blackouts do so of necessity, and would undoubtedly prefer both the social connections, and better reliability from their public utilities. However, that goes back to the question of whether there is a causal link between stronger social bonds and weaker infrastructure, or if it’s simply a correlation and the social bonds make the power outages more tolerable.
I’m pretty sure I’ll end up buying the ham radio with the built-in battery. I hope I never need the integrated battery to assist with emergency communication, but in the event of such an outage, it is my hope that it’ll help forge the social bonds that seem so challenging to create.
