Lights Off is Ghanaian English for a blackout. It's a term that I learned after only a short time here. Right now, we're in the middle of a weeks-long series of power outages because the West African Gas Pipeline, which carries fuel from Nigeria to other West African states, was damaged by a boat (a pirate boat, I heard,) that crashed into it while fleeing the Togolese navy. Although Ghana recently discovered oil off its southwest coast and relies on certain other sources of power like hydroelectric dams, this pipeline supplies most of the energy destined for public consumption. Official estimates on the repair time so far have ranged from early October to late November and may very well continue to change as time goes on. [Update: officials now estimate that this round of blackouts may very well continue through the end of 2012.]
During the energy shortage, blackouts have occurred at least every few days. At first, they were more or less regular, coming once every three nights, and fortunately for me, these nighttime blackouts last only four hours in my neighborhood. Elsewhere, power normally goes down from 6 pm to 6 am. Recently, the blackouts have begun coming more often, with my neighborhood seeing an additional 12 or 13 hour daytime outage every three days or so. It took a few days for the ECG (Electric Company of Ghana, a public agency) to acknowledge this increase, and since then blackouts have become even more frequent.
Tonight I'm optimistic that I'll be able to cook my dinner with the aid of an electric element because the lights went off last night and blackouts tend not to occur on consecutive days or consecutive nights.
A lot of people sleep early when they go off around 6 pm because many Ghanaians routinely rise with or before the sun. I usually stay up so that I get an extra hour or two to iron clothes, check emails, and so on.
Here are a couple of long exposure pictures that I took after sundown during last night's blackout. You can see the grid line beyond which the lights stayed on, and there are some headlights, flashlights, and generator powered bulbs in the foreground.
How can you store fresh ingredients if blackout is such a frequent event? How often did you experience "lights off" before the incident? and you are ironing clothes, what?????? Hopefully they fix it soon.
ReplyDeleteMost Ghanaians don't keep large stocks of perishable foods because they rot so easily during blackouts. I wasn't here too long before they started having lights off so frequently and I was in a neighborhood that is more prone to blackouts, so I can't really give you a good answer to your second question. And yes, I have to iron my clothes for work.
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