A Hailstorm. In Africa. In Our Living Room.

            With the kick-off of summer, it is time to crank up the air conditioner. And yes, I said crank up instead of turn on because we usually use the air conditioner all year round. Most homes in the States have central air or window units, but homes in Luanda have wall units.

            Learning about the wall units has been interesting, to say the least. We have very high ceilings in our apartment with air conditioning units located towards the top of the wall. We use a remote controller to turn the air on and off, as well as to adjust the temperature. And of course since we are outside of the States, the temperature is in degrees Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. All those years of being thankful that they left the metric system out of the schools in the States has finally come back to haunt me.

            We have three air conditioners in our apartment, one in each of the main rooms allowing us to control the individual room temperatures. For example, during the day we leave the air conditioner in the bedroom turned off and the one in the living room turned on. We can also set different temperatures on each air conditioner which makes keeping our living room area at a comfortable temperature while keeping the bedroom slightly cooler for better sleeping much easier.

            Despite a remote to control the air conditioners, they seem to have a mind of their own. One afternoon Adam and I were watching television when all of the sudden I felt a mist of water on my arm followed by a dripping noise that slowly turned into a continuous stream of water running down the wall. I looked up and noticed that water was leaking out of the bottom of the air conditioner and forming a puddle on the floor below. No sooner than it had started, it stopped. We assumed that it was a one-time freak encounter and that we had nothing to worry about. We were wrong.

            A few days later, Adam and I were watching television again when we heard a loud clanging noise coming from the same air conditioner that had been leaking water previously. And before we knew it, we were being pelted by chunks of ice that were shooting out of the vent on the air conditioner. Who could have predicted that it would hail in Africa, in our living room? I guess I brought a little Kansas with me after all. There's no place like home. It took just a few phone calls and a visit by the maintenance man before our air conditioner was back up and running. We are just hoping that the next hailstorm we encounter isn’t in our living room.