Two power plants outside of town provide electricity for all of Kosovo. (They are named, in a traditionally ingenious way, power plant A and power plant B). Anyway, one of these plants is not operational at the moment, and getting it fixed is problematic. How do you fix a great big monster like that without money? The temporary solution is regularly scheduled power outages. Each section of the city is divided into zones, based on the percentage of the population that pays its electricity bills. We’re in zone A (the paying zone). When I arrived at the beginning of September, my building was on a four hour on, two hour off schedule. The people in zone C had juice only fifty percent of the time. It’s kind of a beautiful and fair system, in a Balkan kind of way. It only requires that you toss aside notions of how things are “supposed” to be. The power situation seemed to have stabilized in the last few weeks (coinciding with Richard’s arrival) but tonight we find ourselves plunged into the dark once again: I’m typing on battery power, listening to the sounds of diesel generators, which I will now forever associate with Kosovo. We will also soon lose our water for the evening, as Kosovo is in the middle of a drought, and water rationing will continue until it rains. I’m sure that I’ll start to grouse when it gets cold and wet, and I see people suffering. But for now, I can’t help but marvel at the way rationing forces people to live within their means, which is so very different from the States.