Someone must have been praying for us. It was 2 am and I was strangely and suddenly wide awake. The house was silent and cold, so I rolled over to go back to sleep.
Suddenly, I heard the slam of the national electricity turning on and hitting our breaker box. Normally this would be followed by the cheerful chirp of our electric heater unit turning on. It used too many amps to run on the neighborhood generator and so was wired to only work when the limitless government power came on. But this time there was a distinct popping and fizzing noise. There could only be one explanation. Electrical fire.
We can’t predict how we’ll respond in crisis moments like this. When we’re suddenly faced with an emergency we are at the mercy of reflex, reaction, whatever random prep we may have received for said crisis, and the sovereignty of God. Somehow, I had the presence of mind to spring out of bed and into action. I sprinted to our little half kitchen next to the house’s light shaft (a feature in many local homes built to provide more natural light given all the power outages).
On top of the fridge, we had a little imported fire extinguisher covered in Persian script. I grabbed it, pulled the pin as I ran to the breaker box, and let it blast all over the small multicolored fire coming out of our wall. This was the first time I discovered just how messy fire extinguishers are. As the extinguisher sputtered out its final hiss, half the house had been covered with yellowish-grey dust. Yet the fire wasn’t completely out.
I peered into the breaker box and saw small flames still flickering in the innards behind the breakers. Plastic melted and oozed and the little flames flickered and threatened to grow larger again. Suddenly a random bit of trivia came into my mind. Somewhere in the distant past, perhaps while scrolling Facebook circa 2007, I had read that you could use cooking flour to put out kitchen fires. Well, I figured, if it works for cooking fires, it just might work for electrical fires too.
I quickly moved back to the kitchen and rummaged around in the darkness in the cabinet where we kept the flour. But how to get the flour into the intestines of our electrical box? It would need to be propelled somehow. I reached over to the dish drainer and snatched a spoon.
Our electricity was somehow still working and we didn’t dare try to touch the melted and smoking breakers now to turn it off, so we flipped on a couple of lights so that we could see what we were dealing with. We saw a large black scorch mark surrounding the breaker box and trailing up the formerly white plaster wall. I also saw the spoon I had grabbed – it was a little blue plastic toddler spoon.
Suddenly doubting the quality of my tools, I scooped the little spoon down into the flour bag, bit my tongue in concentration, and tried to accurately fling powder through into the gaps between the breakers and wires and back into the little flames in the innards. It was a messy job, but before long I had emptied the small bag of flour and the flames were finally out.
I looked over at my wife, smiling. It had worked. She was crossing her arms and judging me for some reason. Was it the spoon?
“You had to use the expensive American flour instead of the cheap local stuff?”
For the first time, I looked at the flour bag itself. Sure enough, I had grabbed the expensive American import flour, the kind my wife and a teammate had been so excited to find in the local grocery store and which she was probably saving for birthday cakes. The flour that wasn’t resting on the mangled wires like so much dirty snow was in a little pile at the base of the wall.
“Oops… well… the house didn’t burn down!” I said, making my point by smiling and pointing the toddler spoon at her. We stood there in our bedheads, bare feet, and pajamas, looking around through the dusty air, surveying the damage. It certainly could have been much worse. The unlikely trio of the Iranian fire extinguisher, the American flour, and the toddler spoon had successfully extinguished the fire before it had spread to anything else.
Of all the things most likely to kill us while living in Central Asia, I’d rank the electricity as number one. This was in fact the first of several electrical fires we’d have in the following years.
The causes of these fires came in layers. There was the issue of the inconsistent and aging government electricity supply. There were the supplemental neighborhood generators with their fluctuating voltage and parallel wiring systems that electricians often mixed up with the government wires. Then there were the locals who would hook up illegal power cables wherever they wanted like so many strands of a spider web, usually an attempt to get out of paying a bill. The quality of the hardware was lamentable – cheap wires, breakers, conductors, and wall sockets that melted and fried often enough for the missionaries to learn to rank them by most to least likely to burn up during a power surge. Finally, there was the construction of the houses themselves, where rebar inside of cement touched electrical wires and somehow caused even things like tile floors to conduct electrical current.
One American electrician came over on a short-term team and spent a whole three days trying to figure out why our house had live walls and floors and mysteriously dead outlets. In the end, he threw his hands up in defeat. Even now I can remember the feeling of sticking my hand into the washing machine and feeling a small current coming through the soggy clothes. One of our colleagues was even thrown across his roof as he tried to repair his swamp cooler (Praise God, he was okay).
When people hear about our corner of Central Asia they want to ask us about the dangers posed by wars, terrorism, crime, and persecution. They’d never guess that all of these dangers are not really that bad compared to that posed by the dodgy electricity.
Future missionaries, take heed. Learn some electrical skills while you can. Keep fire extinguishers on hand wherever you’re living in the world. And when all else fails, pull out the flour.
Just try not to use the fancy American kind.
***Update: I’ve been advised by someone who has been trained as a firefighter: Do NOT use flour to try to put out a fire like I did or you may experience a flour fireball. Instead, use baking soda/ bicarbonate of soda/ sodium bicarbonate or even salt or dirt as a safer option. Apparently flour can’t burst into flame if it’s not compact enough. Yikes!
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Entrusted to the Dirt 
thank God, you and your family were OK. Praise the Lord for this mercy.
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Thank you for explaining this. Knowing that flour is combustible, when I read, “I had read that you could use cooking flour to put out kitchen fires.” I wanted to say, Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. But then when I read, “But how to get the flour into the intestines of our electrical box? It would need to be propelled somehow.” I envisioned this exact kind of fireball and was terrified that would be the story. But as you said, by God’s grace that didn’t happen. By His abounding grace.
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