By: mohens.near
Micha
It’s three in the afternoon, there’s no noon breeze as it is nearly still outside, and the only sound from the distance is the hum of wasps in the slightly parched open field across the street.
The cats quietly crouch beside the sofa, resigned to measured movements, as the growing heat spreads quickly. MarmaJ walks hurriedly from the living room to the bedroom, searching for her phone. She’d tried calling the repairman earlier. This was not a part of the plan.
Two days earlier, MarmaJ had had her friends over for a tea party; she needed to talk them into starting an awareness campaign for pollution and climate change. She had talked to Ashley privately before meeting with the entire group. “Dredging the river uptown is a horrible idea and we must get the council to reconsider”, MarmaJ said with her hands flung up in the air in protest. They all agreed to start the campaign and would be meeting at her place again to plan.
So, MarmaJ needs to get the cooling units fixed and there is no one around to help. She decides to check again. She thought she had a hunch that this would happen today but shrugged it off.
The flat piece of electrical appliance is right in front of her and she can’t make out what is wrong: is it a problem with the control panel or the entire unit itself? She takes another look and she notices a streak of black stains on the surface portion of the socket, clearly burnt from a power surge. This had to be the reason why the cooling unit wasn’t working and she was going to fix it herself.
There was no repairman to call and all of her friends would be coming over in two hours’ time. She had to change the socket and plug but she didn’t know how to.
MarmaJ stayed calm, it definitely wasn’t impossible to learn how to change plugs and sockets, though she had to do it within one hour. So, she rushed to the tool shed at the back of the house to get the toolbox, a socket and a spare plug. Running up the stairs with her laptop bag tucked between her side and right arm, her feet weren’t going nearly as fast as she would have liked. She had to browse through several Do-it-Yourself videos on the internet, searching for quick tips and guides to changing sockets. This was a race against time.
Kristen pulled over, two yards from MarmaJ’s front lawn. She had stopped at Jay’s house first to pick him up so he didn’t have to drive since they lived two blocks away from each other. MarmaJ had left the door open, already expecting Kristen and Jay.
“We are not saying enough about the use of pesticides on crops – that’s really damaging. I am sure people want to eat healthy food, I know I want that,” Kristen said, looking around to see if she hadn’t spoken out of turn.
Kristen is a wiry woman with freckles spread across her cheeks. She was one of MarmaJ’s oldest friends.
“I agree with Kristen and I know what fresh farm produce tastes like. I want some of that again.” MarmaJ said, chuckling. Her friends were all here now, time with them was always memorable. So, she wasn’t going to let the problem with the cooling unit ruin today’s meeting. She finally found a DIY video online that looked simple enough for her.
MarmaJ opened the toolbox as she listened to the step-by-step instructions from the video. She took out the bad socket, then disconnected the wires before affixing the new one. The trick was to know the right pinholes to connect the positive and negative ends of the wire, everything ought to fit where they belong.
This made MarmaJ think about the environment and the rapid changes caused by industrial actions. There were no trees anymore, plastic bottles littered open spaces and there was little to no recycling done. The environment was being harmed. “Everything ought to fit into where it belongs”, she said again to herself.
Two screws in and MarmaJ had fixed the bad socket. Changing the bad plug was much easier than fixing the socket. She had the cooling unit working just in time for the meeting and she’d also come up with the perfect line with which she’d lead her conversation. MarmaJ and her friends are on a mission to fix their environment and community, one problem at a time.