Towards Power All Day

The slogan.

Malawi's power company, ESCOM, used to have a slogan that just read "Power all day- every day." Legend has it they were sued because they didn't live up to the motto. So, they added the "towards." I don't even know if they are living up to the towards part anymore. With the rains fouling up the intakes with debris on a key hydroelectric dam, the past week we've been dealing with power on and then off for 12 hours every day. This looks like it will continue until the rains end in the spring.

Here is the load shedding plan for the Lilongwe region for Monday. This
will not be ending anytime soon. I wished I had seen this sooner
as I didn't know there was a plan.

Last week I was going to stay home while M had a conference on the lake. On Wed I decided to join her after going 3 days without coffee the past week. One gets into a bunker mentality of doing odd things when the power is randomly coming on and off. One starts to think about boiling water before going to bed and putting it in a thermos or  cooking dinner in the morning for fear that you might not have power later.  At least the hotel would have coffee and a generator, I thought. And why not see a different part of the country? They had coffee, but not much power. Still it was fantastic to be on the lake.

View from our cabin at Club Makakola

On the way back we were going through Salima and looking to refuel. We thought for sure we could get gas there. The first station we went to was out of gas. The second had gas, but no power to pump it as ESCOM was out and their generator didn't work. M and I decided to sit down, get a soda and make a plan.There was as much chance of the power coming on in 15 minutes as 15 hours and we couldn't drive far. We decided we would stay at a lodge not far away from the station if it came to it. 

Somehow, once we finished the drink, the power came right back on. Talk about being lucky. Every once in a while it all works out and you can get by on just dumb luck. Saturday was that day.

On the way down, we got another speeding ticket. I couldn't
argue my way out of this one.