Lights please! Ramblings on electricity or lack thereof

Living without electricity for an hour's blackout can be fun, especially if you are a child. You get to use candles and flashlights, and it is almost like a camping trip. But when it is every day, for hours and hours, it isn't so fun.

Today the electricity went off around 7AM. It came on again almost 8 hours later, stayed a couple of hours, and went off again. And so it goes.

How do we function? Well, years ago, it was just candles and hurricane lamps. The church would sometimes use a small propane tank attached to a long pole that had a lantern like thingie on the end. Those gave more light. I remember for our Wednesday night prayer meetings, that the deaf group would buy a candle, and when the candle burned down, the meeting ended. Deaf people cannot communicate so well in the dark.

You can still buy treadle sewing machines here, although these days you can run them by electricity OR treadle. Most people that have a home phone, have the wired kind, since those don't go off with the electricity.

These days more and more people have inverters. This is a little box that you hook up to batteries (car batteries or similar). The batteries charge when there is electricity, and when the lights go off, your lights stay on, and draw power from the batteries. The box is wired up through your breaker box, to where you want the electricity.

In my case, as with many middle and lower class homes, everything except the kitchen is hooked up. I have a kitchen light, but the refrigerator and microwave don't work on batteries. I have four batteries. A friend of mine who has twelve, and two inverters, runs even her refrigerator, which is large, and never runs out of electricity.

Yesterday and today, my batteries ran out before the electricity came back on. Maybe this was because they really didn't have much time to recharge between blackouts, and maybe because the blackouts were just so long that even fully charged batteries wouldn't last long enough.

But when I do have battery power, I can do most anything. I cannot blow dry my hair or use the toaster, but I can run my tiny washing machine and of course my computer. I cannot use the school's laser printer, but I could run the tv, if I ever took it out of the closet.

Electricity is not distributed on an equal basis all over the city. Certain areas have no blackouts. Like say, where the president lives. I used to live a block from a hospital, and blackouts were extremely rare. Then there are the areas where neighborhood associations have made a deal with the electric company that they would all pay their electric bills. And of course the rich tend to have more than the poor, but then, they do usually pay for it.

One interesting thing is that lately more and more people are buying AC. This is really new. And I'm not sure that it is good. Because we don't have enough electricity to run lights, and now we will have to run AC? A friend of mine lives above a river community. Now the river communities don't usually pay electricity. Most all of theirs is stolen. And he says he is hearing the hum of AC coming from those houses! Those are usually the poorest people in the land, yet some of them have AC that I, living on a middle class level cannot afford!

About fifty percent of the electricity in the country is stolen. It is stolen by rich, by poor, by large companies and by small, by nonchristians, and sadly, by Christians.

I still remember the day, many years ago, when I lived in an apt. building and they turned our electricity off. When we complained that we had paid our bill, they told us, "but your neighbors haven't." And they weren't going to turn it on again until the rest of our building paid up. Our building had six apts. and only two of us paid regularly. If they only turned off the non-payers, they would have just tapped into the line again; they needed to turn it off at the pole to make it a bit harder. Not that that would stop them: people are always climbing the poles and tapping in, but usually you have to hire someone to do that, whereas on the ground work most people can do themselves.

Anyway, the story continues. They went all through our area shutting off all the electricity of overdue billpayers. The people in the area who stole their electricity didn't have theirs shut off, however, because they weren't overdue! The electric company is fully aware of entire sectors where no one pays. So there we were, sitting in darkness, while the electricity thieves had lights.

As for stealing, I've seen guys climb a pole with no ladder or equipment in less than three seconds! And it is common to see people hooking up electricity. In fact, the electric company doesn't actually hook up my electricity totally. They bring it to the meter on or near my house. It is my responsibility to pay someone to hook it up from the meter to the house.

What you really have to watch out for is people who tap into your electricity, so that you don't end up paying for their use.

By the way, it became illegal to steal electricity this year. I have to wonder what was it before? But now they can actually put you in jail for it. Still I haven't heard of anyone actually getting jailed so far.

One friend told me this story. She had no money to pay her bill, so they shut her electricity off. She decided to leave it off till she could afford to pay it. A month later, she went in to pay the bill and have it turned back on. There she found a double bill. One for the overdue month, and one for the month she had been using candles. The electric company assumed that she had simply tapped into someone else's electricity. They said no one would live a month without it. So she was unable to get hers back until she paid both months, despite the fact that a simple check of her meter would have verified she hadn't used the electricity.

I often joke that we in the DR get a lot more joy out of our electricity than people in the developed world do. Two or three times a day, a shout of joy is heard all through the neighborhood, as the lights come on!