My New Appreciation for Bills

Here in the Sandbox there's no such thing as bills. Everything is on a prepaid system and you don't know when you need to pay until things are turned off. For instance, cell phones. Most people have to buy scratch cards to use their cell phones. I actually have a line, but it's still prepaid. Every month or so, I go in and pay a certain amount. I can use my phone for whatever I want (even international calls), but when it's finished, my phone is turned off until I go back and pay more. Or electricity. We have to go down to the electric company and buy however many kilowatt hours that we want. They give us a little slip with a 20 digit number on it. We take that home, enter the number into the box and it adds to the total. How do we know when to buy more? When the electricity turns off. The trick is to know if the electricity is off just because they decided to turn it off for fun for the whole neighborhood or if we have forgotten to buy more.

What's strange is that it's just normal for things to be turned off. So your phone gets cut off, no big deal, whereas in the states you would NEVER wait until your phone was cut off to pay your bill. And then it always gets cut off at the worst times. It's just an entirely different mindset here. And so I'm learning to appreciate bills and due dates. I used to always know exactly how much I owed and what day it was due so that I could plan ahead. Here, I pretty much just guess at everything. Like I know how long a kilowatt hour of electricity is going to last me?!?!? I guess it just adds to the laid back spontaneity of the culture. You just never know when that extra errand of purchasing more electricity will be added into your day!