Loadshedding

It’s a blog.

Loadshedding. Since there’s not quite enough electricity for everyone, ZESCO must cut down electricity from some parts of the town that others can get it. Like the Finnish compound in next street, they hardly ever lose their power. The story tells that they are at the same line with some ministers. For me the power goes down three evenings a week, usually around sunset. These times the Lusaka residents sit on their laptop in candle light starting up blogs about their highly fascinating life. Due to the rather odd leaps development sometimes takes, power cut does not mean there’s no internet connection. At least if one is using the painfully slow and expensive connection through the mobile phone network. If I sometime get a proper connection, you may access mind blowing multimedia experiences through this blog. For now all I can afford is text.

Bugs. One just crawled inside my monitor. I should have taken AppleCare, I guess. They include laptop fumigations in the package, right? I got also cockroaches in several sizes and seasonal flying termites that come swarming in wherever there’s light. Thankfully I don’t have any. The latter ones are a delicacy for all Zambians, including my borrowed cat.

Blogs. There’re many, and as a forum they’re a bit hard to follow. Many are updated very infrequently, and how is one supposed to know when to check for updates? Are they always that interesting to read, or write for that matter, I don’t know. Well let’s try, I’ll post here when there’s something that does not fit into the Facebook status update slot.

For now, go see the photos and link to me. Maybe this will turn into something. Oh, and you know what’s the hardest part about starting a blog? Naming one. Now I’m actually obliged to write something about chickens and shopping malls. What can one write about chickens and shopping malls?

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Fun facts on loadshedding:

• 20% of Zambians have access to electricity. Rest use mountains of charcoal, I’ll snap you a picture of one of those charcoal bicycles sometime.
• 75% of Zambia’s electricity is used by the copper mines. They never have powercuts, since water must be pumped from the bottom of the mine at all times.
• 100% of electricity is hydropower. More you use more environmentally friendly you are. Too bad that most people don’t have the choice to use any and new plant developments have no way to catch up with rising demand.
• ZESCO, the state power company, announced a reduction on loadshedding before the elections. Now they have announced an increase.