Darkest Africa!

When I was small, I used to think that Africa was called 'Darkest Africa' because it was all jungle and the sun didn't reach the ground!

Now I know better. It's because there is no power for most of the time. And so the lights don't work.

When I moaned about the power before in my blogs, I started off with a joke. But there are two reasons that I am not doing that this time.

1. I cannot think of one.
2. It's not funny any more.

We have had rolling blackouts for two hours at a time, often twice a day, for the last goodness knows how long. In fact, we have a blackboard in the kitchen on which we record interesting things, like shipwrecks, whale sightings, the honeysucker visit, and 'Eskom Einas'. For those of you who are not familiar with our South Africanisms, an eina is a sore like a stubbed toe, a cut finger, and an Eskom blackout! Anyway, it is happening so often now that I cannot keep up with it and I am going through chalk like crazy. Maybe I should change it to 'A day without blackouts'.

Eskom or Eishkom as I like to call it, keep waffling on about lack of diesel, wet coal, poor dam levels, normal maintenance, turbine breakdowns, etc etc, but to be honest they have no clue what they are talking about and think that platitudes will keep Joe Public happy. But, it isn't working and there is rising anger here. And the new power stations that were promised for this year are still not completed. We are lucky in the Western Cape, most of our things work for most of the time, (and it is still light at eight o' clock) but parts of Johannesburg have been without power and water, and for much longer than the 'promised' two hours! Friends of ours were off for nearly twenty-four hours, no reason or excuse, no apologies for meat that has gone off in the freezer etc.

Down here that would be a good reason to have a huge braai in the street, but the frustration levels have gone beyond that. Traffic is snarled for hours, businesses cannot run, people can't get to work and the economy suffers. Imagine being stuck in a lift for two hours? It's happening.

Catherine whatsapps me when Knysna is off and we are often on the same schedule. We had two blackouts yesterday but friends of theirs in Somerset West were off for eight hours. (Eskom would like us to refer to the blackouts as 'outages', or 'power sharing', eish). This morning we heard on the news that things were improving and we were in Stage 2 load shedding. That was minutes before we lost power, but luckily Rob had managed to make coffee!

Fortunately we have a gas hob, solar water heating, solar lamps and paraffin lamps, and we can braai, so we are coping. This morning we had an 'Eskom Breakfast', Rob made a lovely fruit salad, yoghurt and a sprinkling of muesli! No power required!

Our Eskom Breakfast! (pic thanks to Rob)

But it also means that sometimes we cannot watch our soapie 'Eastenders' and, here is the really bad thing, I cannot vacuum or do the ironing, sigh!!

And I also think we shall be moving forward to the past.........we shall buy a clock that needs winding and goes 'tick tock' and has hands that move round and round!!!!!

That's progress!!