[note] Jan.15.2010

Happy Belated New Year!

Well, although I’m alive and well to begin the New Year, things in Zanzibar haven’t been easy recently.

Zanzibar has been out of electricity since December 10, last year and it’s not likely to come back until the end of next month. There had been frequent brief blackouts since November and in the night of December 10th, the power was cut off due to a break down in the power facility supplying electricity to the entire island.

Although basic life lines in Zanzibar such as water and electricity appears to be stable thanks to the tourist development, for ordinary citizens living outside of the tourist hotel and restaurant areas, the life lines are very fragile, especially the electricity. Instead of building its own power plant on the island, Zanzibar draws electricity from the mainland, using an undersea cable which was installed 27 or 28 years ago. Apparently the cable was aging and could not withstand the load of electricity it had been carrying. So it eventually broke down, first in May 2008. A team of engineers came in and did an emergency patch work on the receiving facility on the island just to get the electricity back, but they estimated that the system would collapse again in one year or so if the load was not reduced. As you can imagine, the load hadn't been reduced at all, so one year and six months after the last blackout, another one has occurred just as they estimated. I’d been fearing since I came here that another long term blackout might happen again while I was here. Well, the worry has come true, and apparently, this one is a record breaker.

Now the team was called up again and apparently this time they are overhauling the entire place. The official government announcement this week said that the power should be back by February 20th, though most of the locals are skeptical about it. According to a friend of mine (who’s on a hotel’s generator. I’m currently at his place writing this.), we won’t have the power back daily even after the overhaul because the government will rotate areas on the island to supply the power in order to reduce the load carried by the cable. Still, I’ll be happy to have my lights on once in a few days.

The blackout has been a pain for me, but not something I can’t tolerate. Generator is turned on once in two or three days around my compound just to turn on the water pump and water comes out from a hydrant in the parking lot, so I get a fairly stable water supply, school’s been going as usual since it doesn’t rely on electricity, most of the internet cafes are on generators at least for few hours a day and just as I mentioned, most of the hotels and restaurants are on generators if I need to charge my cell phone or use computers. Only inconveniences I have are that I have to stay in my dark apartment lit only with candle lights at night (my fantasy of prepping lesson plans under the candle lights has been realized though…) and can’t turn on a ceiling fan while I’m sleeping when it is the hottest time of the year. Fortunately the weather has been mild compared to last year, so I’ve been able to get a good sleep most of the nights so far.
This isn’t the case however in the town. Most of the water pumps are electric so no power means no water pumped up. When I’m walking to school in the morning, I see people with their buckets gathering around one of a few communal water pipes with generators on to get water for the day.

While people seem to somehow manage surviving without electricity, if the situation persists after the announced returning date of February 20th, some people I’ve talked to speculates that the situation could go worse. Because economy and life in Zanzibar town highly dependent on electricity, the oil prices will go up from continuous use of generators and this might damage the tourist economy as it enters low season in March. This in turn might lead to drastic rise in crime rate.

Hopefully this will just be a pessimistic prediction and the electricity will be back just as it’s been announced.