Back in Black

Tonight we were sitting, lazily enjoying our after dinner movie. There were about 4 girls in the common room watching the little, old TV with its colors slightly off. The rest of the volunteers had gone out for a night on the town.

All of the sudden, the movie shuts off and the screen goes blank. Great, what happened to the TV? Then we realized all of the lights had gone off too, even the bright street light outside had shut off. The house and the street were completely black and quiet. The power had gone off...on the whole street! No storm or anything. I ran upstairs to look out of our bedroom window at all of Ayacucho. The power in the whole city had gone off! The normally covered in little yellow lights valley was dark. There was one little patch of lights, but the rest of the town had disappeared. I thought about the Shining Path terrorist talk we heard this afternoon and for a minute thought of a terrorist attack. That was silly, so I pushed the thought out of my mind.

I went back downstairs to see that Walter, the doorman, had turned on some portable bright lights at the bottom of the stairs meant for an occasion just like this. Us four movie-goers sat with the other three remaining girls at the bottom of the stairs and wondered what the people that were already out were doing. I was glad I didn't have to be in the middle this Peruvian town in complete darkness. I wondered how long the lights would be out. We wondered when we would get to finish our silly movie (bootlegged 17 Again, I'll embarrassingly admit).

Well, about 15 minutes later the lights came back on and we all cheered. Nothing to worry about, but still a city wide power outage was exciting.

Back in Black, AC/DC