Lights out!

Ahhhh, “The Dark Continent”…

It’s 10:24am and I just switched the house back to generator power after waiting for the power to come back on. It was cut at 8:00am and was supposed to return between 10 and 10:30. I have to teach a class on Cambly in 6 minutes. Ugh.

My desktop has to boot-up, as does the modem and router. I don’t want to miss a class and get any kind of penalty; plus, it’s just rude to do to a student. I made it with seconds to spare, but now I’m running a generator with the power coming on soon (I hope). I send quick text someone asking for them to let me know when the power comes up and start class.

Of course, Africa was called The Dark Continent because it was mysterious to the first explorers from Europe. It is vast, full of wild animals and people and cultures that Europe had no contact with. The nickname reflected the unknown and mystical elements of Africa.

But, I think that the ruling party in South Africa, the ANC, has decided that the word “dark” must be a literal description as they implement load shedding again. They control Eskom, the state owned electric public utility. Years of corruption, neglect, and who knows what else has lead us to this point of continuous load shedding.

Load shedding is another name for rolling blackouts. The power is cut to areas on a schedule to lower the demand on the system—right now it’s done in two and a half hour blocks. Well, two hour blocks, but sometimes it takes them up to half an hour to get the power switched back on. The situation is so bad that it even has its own Wikipedia page. Lovely.

At 10:40am it comes back. Now, I need to do a quick switch so I’m not just burning up money by running the generator while I have power. I tell the student to hold on, run to the box to throw the switch to the mains (if I do it quick enough, the computer stays on), run outside and kill the generator, run back into the house… The dog thinks this is some fun game that he isn’t sure what the rules are… And… the internet takes a bit to reboot.  It swirls around while my student is on the other end, confused and wondering if I’m coming back.

This is what being an online teacher is like in South Africa.

So, how do we handle it? You can get an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS), or go to solar power, or buy a generator.  For us, a generator made the most sense; it was relatively cheap, easy to wire into the house, and it can power everything. There’s a box that the power comes into from both the mains and the generator with a big switch to flip between the two.  I kick over the generator, flip the switch to go from mains to generator power and off I go. It’s noisy and smelly and expensive to run, but it keeps me online.

The situation is so bad that there’s an app for it. You put in your location, or areas you want to keep track of, and it lets you know when you’re going to be cut. You just check what level load shedding is at, and see if your area is falls under it (if your number is equal to or less than the level, out you go).  It’s basically a morning thing: make coffee, check the Load Shedding app.

Load Shedding Notifier

And if load shedding isn’t enough, infrastructure is horrible in some… errr… many areas here in Johannesburg. We were living in Westdene and one day there was a big pop at our substation followed by darkness. The power was down on just our street for six days. Yes, six days.

In today’s world, no power for six days is unimaginable. No ‘net, no kitchen appliances, no Netflix… No espresso machine!

Thank goodness my wife and I had the generator. We burned a lot of unleaded, but we had no choice. I would run it for hours straight, give it a rest, run it again for classes. Even with this, we lost food in the fridge because we couldn’t keep it on non-stop.

Neighbors brought stuff over for us to charge: phones, tablets, laptops for work, oxygen machines. Yeah, imagine being on oxygen and not having a way to charge your machine. Sure, this was a breakdown, but even during load shedding, especially the higher levels, it can be life threatening to some people.

We’re also campers, so we have rechargeable and solar lights, gas stoves help. At our new place, we’re looking into solar to keep the interruptions to a minimum.

You definitely find ways to work around this. And, I’ve found that South Africans are very resilient and adaptable. It seems everyone has ways to work around it or will soon. It’s one of my favorite things about this country.

It’s time for me to make another coffee and get stuff done before the next round of cuts.