Life in the Ghetto
One thing I have come to realize while living in this place is that darkness is not only the absence of light but also something that you will get used to over time even though you know it is not normal. The past six months that I have been staying here, I have not seen even a spark of electricity and I think this says a lot the situation of this place.
The picture above which I took some days ago, day more about the situation; the fuel station is the only place you can see light in the area during night time, while everywhere around is enveloped with darkness. People gathered around the fuel station at night to enjoy the bright night.
The irony here is that nobody complains of this reality; everyone seems to have adapted to the nature of things as if it were completely normal to be without electricity for months. The only people who can boast of electricity light at night are those who possess a solar powered system; the rest of us struggle in whatever ways that we could.
For me, it has affected many things, especially my ability to work properly at home. I have not been able to use my laptop for over 8 months and we pay daily to charge our mobile phones and power banks; a situation which in itself becomes difficult to maintain.
Today, however, I had the opportunity to use my laptop after all these time being idle, and I was very much excited at the opportunity because I felt that finally I had found a solution to my power challenge. I took my laptop to my brother's office, where there is a solar system and my brother let me use his space to work on my laptop, but the story didn't play out as I had hoped. The laptop system was misbehaving badly and taking forever to load websites and pages. I felt very disappointed about it because something that I was looking forward to didn't went as anticipated.
At that point, I could not help but think about my other electrical appliances back home; the television set and other things that I have not used all these while due to power problems and one begins to worry about how it would be once I decided to plug them into an electricity supply again.
In a bid to digest all these, it's a bit funny to know that all the appliances in my house could fail to work again simply because they are never used in the house for more than say thirty minutes since I moved to this area before being packed away, because of no power supply. This is a point which is actually not really discussed when people are talking about no electricity supply.
Generally speaking it's not only not having electricity but also all of the consequences that surround it and till we can have what I consider to be real electrical power this will be our case.