Water/Power Cuts

Part of daily life here is the possibility of electricity and/or water supplies being cut. Cuts happen at random times and have arbitrary durations – anywhere from a minute to a day, typically. At times, in cases of a shortage during the dry season, I am led to believe that this is a systematic procedure, where neighborhoods go out on a rolling basis. More often I would guess the cause is shoddy infrastructure. There are stories of water going out for weeks at a time, but this is fortunately something I haven’t experienced. Those of us with resources provide for alternatives: generators and water tanks. There is a large generator at school, and many homes in my neighborhood have them as well. .

Here at my place, the “teacher apartment building”, we have water storage on top of the building but no generator. The water tank lasts for about a day without being replenished, so often we don’t even notice when the water goes out. It has happened though, that I have come back in the evening after a long game of Ultimate, dirty and drenched in sweat, that there is no water left in the tank and I am forced to access the less than adequate barrel of water that is kept in the laundry room for such emergencies, forcing me to experience what it is like for most people here to bathe. Against power outages, there is no backup, which frequently leaves us in the dark and is really not as big a deal as it might seem. Flashlights and candles do the job just fine.