Enough!

OK. I’ve had it. For three months, I’ve accepted the power outages that became predictable. I was quiet about it when they were daily occurrences…once a day.

Now, it’s different. They’re still regular but they’re regular three or four times per day. And they’re so regular that one could say they are planned. For instance, they generally occur at 10 am, 1:30 pm, 4 pm and 7:30 pm. In fact, during the World Cup, the power went off precisely :30 after the last game ended each evening.

The outages are 1-2 hours in length. The challenge in our household is not necessarily losing electrically powered conveniences, like laptops, which do have batteries and will continue to run. And light because during the day, we have natural light. And in the evening, we have a generator. It’s the loss of the internet, which is wireless and operates from our neighbor’s home. When the power goes down, the antenna shuts down and must be rebooted manually. You get the picture: when no one is home, no reboot and no internet. So Skype calls for business are interrupted or don’t happen on time, documents, which were to be delivered against a deadline, aren’t delivered. Suddenly, it’s clear why Africa runs somewhat on an ‘as-needed basis”. The infrastructure is unreliable, and consequently, there’s a laxness about deadlines that doesn’t exist in developed cultures.

It’s an interesting way to learn. And it’s not necessarily what I want, but it’s what I have.