Mt. St. Mindy Erupts Again

When I was in college I spent a semester in Nealtican, Mexico living in a village near an active volcano named Popocatepetl. My first day there I noticed there were evacuation maps and notices spray painted on walls all over town. So the next morning when I woke at around 5 am to a siren and a man shouting "Eeee-gas!" at the top of his lungs, I was sure the volcano had erupted and it was time to go. I jumped out of bed and hurried down the ladder from my bedroom to find everyone in my host family still fast asleep. Hadn't they heard the alarms?

It turned out that this "alarm" was just the guys who went around town every morning selling gas canisters for water heaters and stoves with a car alarm announcing their arrival. A lovely wake-up call that eventually I learned to awaken to without panic. When they said I'd be living in a Mexican village, I'd imagined I'd wake up to a rooster, but like most things in life, the place wasn't exactly the way I pictured it!

I still remember vividly the panic I felt my first morning there, wondering what in the world I was thinking coming to live next to an active volcano a gazillion miles away from home and family!

(A photo of Popocateptl, which did actually erupt ash a month or so after I arrived)

When I moved to India, the biggest surprise was not the active volcano a few miles away (there are none to my knowledge), but the volcano in me that suddenly became active when I became faced with corruption and cheating seemingly on every turn because I'm a rich foreigner, an easy, uninformed target. That volcano hasn't been very active lately, but yesterday the Cutler Compound's peanut gallery got to witness yet another (apparently entertaining) eruption.

In our neighborhood we also buy gas by the can for our stove just like those good 'ol days in Mexico, but it comes on a bike or in a small truck and you call and order it. We pay a company $9 about once a month to refill our empty canister while we use our second one, so we are sure to have an extra one handy if we need it. In the last few years that we have lived here we have occasionally, for various reasons, found ourselves without gas for a few days, and become quite handy at microwave cookery and pestering the gas people for another canister. It's a very odd feeling to not be able to boil water or scramble eggs for days at a time.

Margaret has mentioned a few times lately that the gas canister sometimes isn't as heavy as it should be when they deliver it, but I hadn't thought through what to do about it. Yesterday the gas guy came to deliver a newly-filled gas canister and I asked him to come inside with the canister so we could weigh it on our new scale (Thanks, Pulsiphers!).

The canister has the weight of the canister printed on it (16.3 kg in this case) and it's supposed to have 14.2 kg of gas in it (also printed on the canister), making what should be a total of 30.5 kg. The gas-wallah put the canister on the scale and it weighed in at 25.

I tried, with Margaret's help translating, to tell him that this wasn't acceptable, that this canister was only 2/3 full. He acted like he didn't know what we were talking about, but he left and brought back a new canister and his boss. We put it on the scale and this time it weighed 27. I repeated calmly (to the boss this time), that this canister was not full, and we needed a full canister.

When he looked at me blankly, I took out a piece of paper and wrote the math on it:

16.3 + 14.2 = 30.5

I pointed at it insistently as my voice started to rise, and my blood started to boil. He looked at me like I was crazy. Anil our driver then came in, asked what was going on, and started laughing. I asked him what was so funny. He just kept laughing.

And then I starting boiling over with anger. I said (okay, shouted) something like, "Maybe I'm just a stupid American and I don't understand things, but I can do the math and I can see that you are cheating me." After Margaret trying to translate back and forth for a while (though she never translates everything--I really should learn Hindi better), and nobody doing anything, I wondered, was I missing something? Most probably.

But eventually the guys went back to their truck and brought a third canister, which, miraculously, weighed a little over 30 kg, about as much as it should. I won! Sort of. I don't think you're a winner if you find yourself shaking for a 15 minutes after you've yelled and screamed enough to get your way. I asked Margaret if she ever has this problem. She says this happens to them often, but they don't have a scale to prove it, so sometimes they just have to take the canister anyway.

So I know all you math-minded people out there are computing that this gross injustice probably adds up to a max of $3 a month, but over 2.5 years that's $90! It's not a ton of money, but it's something. I'd rather choose to give it to the poor people in India than be swindled out of it. That money could send a girl in Delhi to school for 5 months. But maybe I would have better karma if I'd just let it go and not let it get to me.

For all I know, the gas company in Texas was cheating me in more sophisticated ways. The difference is that in Delhi I get to look the corruption in the face and choose whether to take it or not. Someday I plan to live in a place where the gas comes to me in a pipe and the corruption lurks deeper, where it never gets over 90 degrees in the summer and it snows in the winter, and nobody stares at me like I'm an animal in the zoo.

But until then, we may have to keep enduring occasional eruptions of Mt. St. Mindy. Let's hope eventually this volcano of my temper enters the inactive category.