A couple of days ago August Mission‘s Ukraine team went to the Polish port city of Gdansk  to take delivery of a shipping container of humanitarian aid goods donated by NuDay.  Since the August Mission team were going to be gone for several days, I had nothing much to do in Khmelnytskyi, so I traveled out to the countryside to visit my friends at the assisted living home.  

The trip started out inauspiciously, because I could not get the local taxi hailing app to work on my U.S. phone.  I really needed a taxi to carry myself and my luggage to the bus station, so I texted a local friend and asked him if he could use the app on his phone to call a taxi for me. Sure enough, a taxi picked me up about 10 minutes after I contacted my friend. Thank goodness for good friends – that big favor seems to have been the boost I needed to turn the luck in my favor for the rest of the day!

On the way to the bus station, I used Google translate to tell the taxi driver I needed to catch the bus to Donaivtsi (the town nearest the assisted living center).  He nodded reassuringly, so I sat back and relaxed for the rest of the ride.  When we got to the bus station, he paid cash from his own wallet for parking; then he parked his cab, helped me unload my luggage, escorted me into the station and helped me buy the correct bus ticket. Finally, he walked me right out to the terminal and made sure I got on the right bus. After all of that, he asked me for the cab fare plus the parking fee, and he seemed extremely grateful when I gave him a little extra.  It’s wonderful to meet people that will go the extra mile to help a stranger in need.

The rest of the journey was smooth sailing. The bus ride was uneventful, and Gennadiy, the director of the assisted living home, was waiting to pick me up when I arrived in Donaivtsi.

However, when we arrived at the home, the electrical power was out.  I wasn’t too surprised, because Gennadiy had told me they had been experiencing periodic outages for the last couple of weeks.  I’m not unfamiliar with power outages myself, because where I grew up, we frequently had power outages during stormy weather. Nevertheless, whenever I walk into a dark, unpowered building, my heart always sinks a little bit.

Although the assisted living home has been coping OK so far, not having electric power is hugely inconvenient. Not only is there no lighting, no television in the residents’ lounge and no way to wash laundry, there’s also no running tap water when the power goes out, because electricity is needed to pump water from a well. 

But when really cold winter weather hits, perhaps the biggest problem will be heating the building, even though they don’t use electricity to heat.  Rather, a wood furnace heats a boiler, then a pump circulates hot water through radiators inside the building rooms.  The problem is, the pump is electrically powered. So, when the power goes out, the pump stops working, and the hot water doesn’t circulate through the radiators in the rooms anymore. Actually, this can be extremely dangerous because the water in the boiler could become super-heated steam and the pressure could actually cause the boiler to explode. So if grid power goes out when they are burning a hot fire in the furnace, they need to immediately find an alternative source of power to keep the hot water pump working. They have two systems, one is an automobile battery that runs through an inverter to provide high-voltage power to run the pump. But this system has not been very reliable. The other alternative is to run a gasoline generator. 

An advantage of running the gasoline generator is that it also provides power for the tap water pump and laundry washing machines (but not the hot water heaters for the showers or the kitchen dishwashing area), some lighting and the television in the residents’ lounge area. The generator consumes approximately one liter of gasoline per hour, depending on load.  When grid power is out, the facilities engineer generally runs the generator for about three hours midday, starting in time for the lunch service.  Then he will turn it on again for three or four hours starting at supper time.

Almost miraculously, it seemed, the power came on this morning at about 8 AM, and stayed on for most of the day. The home only has a single shower stall available for residents, so after lunch, residents were queued up getting hot showers one after another, taking advantage of the chance to freshen up before the next outage.  Sure enough, grid power went off again at about 7:30 PM.

During the 64 hours I spent at the assisted living home on this visit, we were without grid power for about 48 hours – two full days without grid power during a span of less than three days.  Although the staff and residents are coping with the situation with aplomb, these outages are hugely disruptive to the daily sanitation work that is central to the operation of this home for elderly residents, many of whom are bedridden and cannot eat, wash or go to the toilet without assistance.