Monday, November 25, 2013

Dark Days


Power is never expected to be stable… Especially when living in the heart of Africa.  Once you are blessed with this amenity that assists from lighting our rooms to keeping our drinks cold and vegetables fresh in the fridge, it is difficult to adjust but you learn quickly.  You discover that a pot covering your cheese on a cold cement floor along with candles melted to every possible countertop helps in filling the gap when electricity is missing.

Umeme, Uganda’s power company, has been a hoot and a holler during my service thus far.  As expected, power goes out all the time. 

Daily. 

Often it occurs multiple times as hour. 

Sometimes it goes out for days.

But why?  I decided to inquire with some of the people that I work with. 

“Tara, it is simple.  Every time power goes out it is because a pole falls over.”

“Okay.  Can you explain then how the power goes out and then ten seconds later it returns?”

“It is because Umeme was there and able to immediately fix it.”

“Okay.  You don’t think that Umeme ever shuts off power on purpose?”

“Oh no Tara.  They would not do that.  This is not America.”

I beg to differ.

It seems that the power in Kitgum goes off as soon as everyone is finished paying his or her bills.  Ironic?

Now I tried thinking of some logical reasons for the lack of power and wanted to share these ideas to my coworkers.  Logical reasoning #1?  A rolling blackout.  I thought I would have gotten some of them to switch their thinking…

Nope.

They still believe it is the falling poles.

I can’t say for sure what causes the lack of power in Uganda and specifically the many shortages that take place up North.

I can say for now is thank gosh Meeting Point has a generator that runs for some few hours a day where I can charge everything before returning home to the cave.

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