Dar es Salaam Diary

Since I always like to look on the bright side, I’ll put it this way: my experience just got a lot more... authentic. This past Thursday, the Tanzanian government announced that from now until December they would be rationing electricity – imposing blackouts in most areas from 6 AM until 6 PM seven days per week. For the past three years Tanzania has been afflicted by drought, which means that the water level at the main hydro-power dam is too low to sustain full energy production. In light of this, the government is planning to build two new power generators, but they won’t be completed until December. Hence the need to ration in the meantime.

Daily 12-hour rationing won’t have as devestating an impact as it might seem, since the blackout hours will likely be reversed in areas that are heavily commercial (so that power can be on during business hours) plus a lot of offices (including mine) have generators. Also, as is not entirely shocking, the schedule for the blackouts has not been adhered to all that strictly thus far.

That said, it is still rather an inconvenience, since daily power outages mean you can’t really keep anything in the fridge. And the generators are often overworked and can be unreliable. They also make an infernal racket. At work, ours is usually on from 8 AM until 1 PM, at which point it takes an hour lunch break, and is then turned back on until about 4:30 or 5:00 PM. While this is nice since it precludes working late, it can be a big pain if you’re really up against a deadline.

I was bitching about the power cuts the other day to my manager and he expressed his sympathy, saying he knows that in the States electricity “flows like milk and honey” and if there’s a blackout it’s front-page news. I was a bit chagrined, remembering the spate of articles in the New York Times after the blackout a few summers ago. (As an aside that hopefully won’t sound *too* holier-than-thou, I was somewhat struck by the level of triviality of many of the articles on the New York Times website when I went to check it recently. That said, I then proceeded to scour the Internet for the latest information on such high-minded issues as Katie Holmes’ pre-nup and Brangelina’s spawn… Shiloh?!! Why is it that celebrities insist on naming their children such awful names? You would think they could have at least given her [Thanks, Leigh Anne for cluing me in on Shiloh's gender!!] a nice “African” name after spending all that time in Namibia…)