Black Outs

Lately we’ve been having a lot of black outs. I know it’s the dry
season, so I wasn’t really surprised. But I found out on Sunday
there’s a much better story to explain these “light off” times.
Apparently, part of the electricity we use here comes from
hydroelectric power in the Akosombo dam over the Volta river. But a
large portion is also from a natural gas source harvested off shore
and shipped around the West African coast via underwater pipeline
(This sounds cool already doesn’t it?). Well, apparently the Somalian
pirates are causing trouble again! Do you remember hearing about them
in the news a few years ago? I remember they were described then as a
few terrorists in a rowboat trying to declare war on America for
killing one of their fellow pirates. Well, apparently they are back,
and on our side of the continent this time (I’m kind of impressed they
made it all the way over here). I guess the Togolese navy (Togo is a
country next door to Ghana) was chasing them and somebody got too
close to the underwater pipeline. Next thing you know, the pipeline
has a leak, and now we get power only 60% of the time. Isn’t that a
great story! Way better than the boring old “water is low in the dam”
explanation.

And since there is some power available, we can almost predict when it
will go off. If we’ve had it all day, it’ll probably go off in the
evening. If it went off at night it’ll come on in the middle of the
night or the morning. If we had it all weekend (Awesome!) it’ll be off
the next few days. The tense times are right around 6 or 7 am or pm,
since that’s when the lights will go if they are going to go. So you
get as much as you can done since doing it without electricity is much
more difficult.

I know I sound casual about this, believe me, frequent black outs were
a source of major frustration when we first came. But I’ve learned I
can’t do anything about the power being off, so I have to just switch
my focus from what I wish I could be doing to what I actually can do
(thank you Stephen R Covey and highly effective habit number one!).
There’s so much of life that is unpredictable and out of my control
here that I can see why people here are more laid back and less
willing to try and make life better. Storming the government here and
demanding better power…that might bring about less black outs…but they
may just look at us and say, “I’m sorry, I can’t control when Somalian
pirates are going to burst a natural gas line!”