the other night I was ranting

So I feel like I have nothing to write about - a problem I was worried about some time ago, the potential for this place to become "normal" to me to the degree that nothing jumped out as a subject to describe to people far from this reality. We - the trainees - are staying at Gambia Pastoral Institute again. Soon we will no longer have the title 'trainee', and will probably be the 'new education volunteers'. Then that will change in its time. GPI, as it tends to be called, has a generator that they run in the evening from around dinner time to 10:30, or earlier if it has an issue like it does tonight. So, I write on my laptop and its battery. Before the generator died, it had some fits and starts - one of the reasons I spent 550 dalasi on a voltage stabilizer yesterday. Another was that I saw two computers have their motherboards blown at our model school training, due to spikes in the generator's output, allegedly. So, electricity is a constant consideration - in a way it reminds me of the surf in Hawaii. There are times when the electricity is on, people (well, geeks at least) get excited to make use of it, and there are times when it's off and people go about their normal lives. Generators, solar, batteries, and the rest can extend the metaphor in a way - attempts to balance the power, to surf on the vagaries of electrons' flow through the grid, and be able to get where we want to go. It's a limited analogy, but I can't think of another way to describe what it's like to have random electricity.
In Fara Fenni, the family I will be living with has just purchased and started using a small generator for running lights and a tv with vcr. “Maria” tops the list of desired programming – a soap opera from some Latin American country, poorly dubbed into English, which has already been shown in its entirety to this country a few years ago. I can't really convey how bad the quality is, but it's worse than anything I ever recorded with a vhs camera in my youth. Especially anything starring Amos the cat. But, the upside is that I may at some point have a wire coming into my house, which would allow me to charge a battery and run my laptop with some regularity. So, I won't complain about Maria too much.
Gambians want electricity in their homes for three main reasons that I have seen so far: lights, fans, and tvs. The first two make total sense to me, the last very little. Increasingly, they want to charge their cellphones, which is more the type of thing I will be wanting to do – juice for battery operated gadgets.