Powerless

Sorry to have kept you in the dark over the past couple of weeks, but you see I have been in the dark, too. There has been a scarcity of power recently, which means a scarcity of many other things: internet, foods requiring refrigeration and water, to name a few. To make matters worse, our town is running out of soda and beer. In other words, we have a crisis on our hands.

But you wouldn’t know it by walking past the Tanzanian energy company. I strolled by last week and saw more activity happening outside - in the form of guards slouching against the fence and laughing - than appeared to be happening inside. Six of the eight generators for our town stopped working earlier this month, and while spare parts exist, they don’t exist in Tanzania, and rumors suggest that it will take months rather than weeks to fix them.

The guards are ostensibly protecting the Power Company from some sort of attack, but I couldn’t help but wonder who is working on the inside to protect the machines from their most recent fate: negligence. What’s the point of guarding something that isn't maintained adequately to ensure that it's worth protecting?

I suddenly understood why the guards were laughing.

I am lucky (well, relatively speaking). My neighborhood met and agreed to pay exorbitant sums of money to keep a generator working for eight hours per day for the houses on our patch of the hillside. But what about everybody else? Water is already scarce in our town, and without power to keep water pumps pumping, people are having to venture further and further to get their water. Many people are now venturing into my backyard to fill their buckets, emptying the tank for my neighborhood which is being filled by the generator my neighbors and I are paying to run. (I just don’t have the heart to stop them; everybody needs water.)

For me, the major inconvenience is an increase in the number of bugs that fly into my hair when I write by candlelight at night. But for many people this isn’t just a matter of comfort, it is a matter of safety and public health.

I hope when the spare parts arrive from Holland there is an instruction guide that will show the Power Company how to maintain the equipment they have. Because the next time these old machines breakdown, there may not be spare parts to fix them.