La Luz Se Fue...The Electricity Went Out

So last night we were battling with our new friends and neighbors a group of bats rapidly multiplying in our wall. We were trying to close off the eaves of the house with a plastic bag and duct tape, well the little buggers were crawling under the plastic bag barrier and crawling around on the wall then flying through the house. We were trying to shoo them out the door, Dan is howling in fear swinging the broom around, while Phoebe is laughing...and in the process we hit the main wire of electricity running into the house and unbeknownst to us, it melted and fried when one of the currents was eliminated. This is only the beginning of our night adventure. At 9pm the electricity turned back on for the evening. The only reason we knew it was because our 70-year-old nearly deaf neighbor had the TV on so high we could hear the program in our living room. We both looked at each other confused because our house was still dark. So, we went over to our neighbors house, which led to her screaming at our other neighbor to confirm we had luz/electricity. What a mystery? Then all four of us in our pajamas started poking around the house with candles and flashlights until it was found and confirmed several times, yes the wire coming into the house must have disconnected, pure genius. So, you would think any normal person would have said goodnight and gone to bed, waiting for a professional in the morning; oh, no...not in the DR. Both neighbors told us to immediately turn off the breaker in the house. The next thing we knew all of the 3ft extension cords from both houses (four total) were being connected and then through gruff commands were being run from the window of a neighbors house into the window of our house, and that's where it got really interesting. They gave us the male side of the extension cord? We asked them to give us the female so we could simply plug in our fan and go to bed. "No, foreigners they told us, we know about this and you do not. Poor foreigners don't know anything about being innovative with electricity" they said to each other. We were dumbfounded. If it wasen't for our basic understanding of D/C and A/C currents at this point we would have thought they were going to blow up the house. Then, our little Dona neighbor unhooked the wire from the socket, inserted the positive and negative into the female part of the socket, wrapped a bag around it and screamed to us, "Plug it in!" We both looked at each other and in unison said, "You!" Then the lame Americans waited for the gutsy grandma from next door to come over, plug it into to our socket and, lo and behold, our electricity was back. Impressive. Today a professional came over and fixed the disconnected wire in about 5 minutes. We were more then grateful and so was the yogurt in the fridge. This taught us two very important lessons, to never doubt ingenuity, and to leave fixing electricity to professionals and grannies...also, an industrial extension cord might be our next purchase or wish list item for a suitcase in the states.