Electricity Outages

After a week of electricity outages, we're up and running again (we hope).

It's not uncommon for electricity to go out here, but it's usually just for a few hours.  This week was unusually bad, with much of the town experiencing outages at some point this week.  Many restaurants and other shops had generators, but schools, government buildings, our apartments, etc, were left without power for a lot of this week.

When the power goes out for that long, there is also a "power sharing" schedule that gets put into place.  For example, where there normally might be 3 electricity lines, if 1 or 2 of them go out, then the last line with electricity gets fed to the various places on a schedule so that everyone shares the remaining electricity.  So far, the schedule that we've heard has not been accurate, but we use the electricity when we have it! 

In Sakina, where I lived in 2009, the power would go out almost every night or every other night because we were on an electricity schedule.  I don't know, but I'm guessing the village may not have had as much access to electricity.  We haven't seen that too much here since we are living so close to Arusha town, where they definitely have more access.

Hopefully, it is back up now for good!

Word of the day: electricity - umeme