Lately Kenya Power has been sporadic. Seems they go in waves, we’ll go weeks without any interruptions then BAM all of a sudden we’ll go weeks with brown outs, “blinks” (where electricity literally goes on and off in the blink of an eye) and outages for hours.
Today we are on one of those outages. Yesterday it was off for a couple hours and they “fixed” it…..for now. That’s my new saying “for now” because we had a guy come and fix our shower, after he was done he said it was “fixed for now” and sure enough it worked for another couple days then stopped again!
Anyway, last week we had someone come out during a brown out to check on the generator (it was making a weird sound and we want to make sure that is up to speed). Now the generator not only makes the same noise but is now hard to start….so he fixed it for now.
We are now on generator, of which I am thankful but would be nice to have it working properly and are not sure when Kenya Power will be back on. The reason, however for this post is to tell you some repercussions of no electricity at the children’s home.
Without electricity (or generator) we can’t pump water….
without pumping water we can’t fill the tanks….
the kids use approximately 3,000 liters per day of water….
is someone going to hand crank 3,000 liters of water per day for their use?….
without water in the tanks we can’t water the napier grass (cow food)….
without napier growing the cows don’t eat correctly….
without eating correctly milk production is down….
low milk production means less milk for the kids or no milk for sale….
less milk for the kids means we have to buy milk….
or no milk for sale means we are losing
Plus using the generator is costly with the amount of petrol used, so electricity would be nice.
I’m now on hold with Kenya Power customer service to see if they have any idea of when power will be back on (so I’m using credit on my phone while on hold). Here’s what I was told….when I called at 1:30 am they sent out an emergency team and they found a “fault in the line” but couldn’t do any repairs since it was at night so another repair team was sent out at 8 am (now to be clear we do get light at 6 am around here) and they are now working on it (it’s 10:30 am right now) but do not have a time frame for when it should be back up and running.
Guess I should post this before generator is turned off…..