More Powerlessness

For the last three months we have continued to have constant power problems in Nanga Eboko. I'd say between January and early April the lights have been out about 60% of the the time. Some of this was due to forest fires taking down lines in between here and Yaoundé, but more recently we had no power because SONEL (the Cameroonian electric company) shut power off for the town. Because the water levels in the rivers are low near the end of the dry season the dams don't generate enough power for the whole country. So, to keep the lights on in the bigger towns, SONEL will cut the power to the smaller (and poorer) towns like Nanga. We just had our first rains in the last few weeks, so as we move into the rainy season hopefully the situation will improve. Then it will just be the thunderstorms and torrential downpours that knock out the power instead.

I'm told corruption may have also played a part. I have no independent confirmation, so it may just be a rumor, but I have heard that individuals working for SONEL claimed they were buying new turbines for the dams, but in fact pocketed the money and left the old turbines in place. When an American company took over SONEL they were suddenly confronted with old turbines breaking down and recently decided to replace them with new ones. While this makes sense, it also means that power is offline while the new turbines are being installed.

In the past, when the power went out we could at least use the University's generator for a few hours a day. About two months ago though, the generator began to go on the fritz. You could hear it cough and wheeze as you walked by and it didn't kick out enough juice to run things at the school, so when we were on the generator you could walk around campus at night and see lights going on and off all over campus. I took to keeping an oil lamp lit after dark with the flame turned down low since the lights might cut out at any given moment.

Sometimes the generator produced enough power for me to run my computer, so I could work for an hour or two here and there. Other times the voltage was too weak and I had to shut everything down. Since I was writing all my lectures, exams, course materials, etc on my computer, you can imagine what this has done to my productivity. I've been doing a lot of reading lately.

These problems hosed my computer classes more than once. I was often in the middle of walking my students through how to do something on their machines, when suddenly the power cut out and some or all of the machines in the lab went down. At night it was even worse since everyone had their lights on. During one night class I gave not only could we not keep the computers running, but after I had the students shut down all the machines hoping I could at least give them some of the material on the board, the lights wouldn't even stay on. After a few minutes trying to teach with the lights blinking on and off constantly I finally gave up and sent them home.

Eventually, after dealing with this for weeks, they finally called a technician. He arrived and removed the bad component - which shut the generator down entirely. We're still waiting for him to come back with a replacement part, leaving us with only SONEL electricity. Which is out most of the time.

Since the pumps that send us water are powered by (you guessed it) electricity, that means that when we have no power, we also lose water. Again, the generator allowed us to power our own water pump so at least the campus had water, but now that's not an option either. Bucket baths are now in style at my house. But not every day - that would take too much water. Just need to wear extra deodorant.

This situation also aggravates our maintenance problems. Constant fluctuations in voltage are not the best things in the world for computers. In just one day of these problems I watched one machine in the lab start blue screening and another blow its power supply. This is the main reason why computers here die all the time. They desperately need a big voltage regulator for the lab that will protect the machines.

A few weeks ago I found that I'm not the only one irritated by the power situation though. the townspeople got sick of having their electricity cut all the time, so they staged a little rebellion and barricaded the road through town (which is a major trucking route from the eastern part of the country) until SONEL agreed to turn the lights back on. The local gendarmes wisely decided to leave the townspeople alone. Given that they live here too, they probably sympathised. I was just hanging out on campus while all this was happening and missed all the excitement until after it was over.

The stunt may have worked - after a day or two SONEL turned the power back on. We had power for a few days, then it went out again. This time, the townspeople were set to cut the road again and also hold a general strike to shut down the town. However, SONEL turned the lights back on just before the strike was supposed to start and the Governor of the province came out to try to soothe tempers in the town. Since then things have calmed down, even though the power has remained irregular. Maybe people just threw up their hands and gave up. Folks do that a lot here in Cameroon.