That we never run out of coffee.

The idea of a world where electricity is illegal may be unthinkable to many, since so much of our day-to-day activities currently depend on it. However this possibility is not so foreign to some. I, for example, live in a country where, although electricity is not illegal, it is a scarce and difficult to access resource.

It has been many years since the electric service started to become unpredictable, but as of the year 2019 the dystopia started to materialize and become closer and closer. That year a blackout left the entire country without electric power for more than four days, when the authorities restored the service nothing was the same again. Since then we cannot always count on electricity, we have daily rationing of 6 to 8 hours, in addition to some spontaneous outages that respond to all the failures that undermine the electric power system nationwide.

In 2019 no one gave a concrete answer as to what had happened, the government spoke of a cyber terrorist attack to our electric service. On the other hand, its opponents claimed that it was due to the lack of maintenance and the neglect of the state regarding the system that provides us with electricity. In short, it became a political issue and different campaigns were made to make money out of the situation, while millions of people were drowning in despair.

But you know what? In the midst of all this madness, there was never a shortage of coffee. Many things changed about the purchase and consumption of our favorite beverage, but we always had a good cup of steaming coffee in our hands. How did we do it? At first we opted for ground and packaged coffee, in our region there are good brands, since we are a producing area par excellence. An old greca on the gas stove was our best friend for a long time.

Later my partner and I had to move to a small rural town, where we rarely got gas for our cooking. So we took up the ancestral ways of cooking with firewood, at that time we explored a traditional way of preparing coffee, which consists of boiling the water using a hot wood. I must add that this was my first post in this beautiful community and although at that time I was much more optimistic than now. I remember with great joy that time I recorded the preparation of coffee with tizón to share it with you.

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Anyway, we have had to go back to old ways of preparing coffee. Sometimes we have bought the coffee beans that our neighbors produce and grind them in the manual machine. We do this among several families so that the process of roasting and grinding the beans is easier and less expensive. It is not like drinking it freshly ground but if it is well preserved it keeps its flavor and aroma for a long time.

So in answer to this week's question, what I would do in a dystopian reality where electricity was illegal, would be exactly what I do now: take up traditional, ancestral ways of brewing. No matter how hard things have become, we have never lacked coffee, we have even prepared it by burning sticks or twigs, even old papers or cartons. We have had to survive and will continue to do so, but always with a cup of coffee in our hands.