Let There be Light

My big news this week is that I now have electricity in my house! It’s a great convenience, but before you get too jealous of my luxurious life, let me explain.

Envious of my neighbor’s well-lit porch, I mentioned to him that I was interested in getting power installed in my house. He brought me over to the hardware store, which is run by a man and his one or two assistants (you never can tell around here). The store itself shares a building with one of the tele-centers in town and is a rectangle maybe twenty feet long and half as wide. Some pipes lie on the floor, and a shelf holding light bulbs, wire, and miscellaneous tools runs along one wall. Everything is covered with the signature layer of dust that inevitably accumulates on any item in this country not used for more than ten minutes.

I explained what I wanted to the electrician, and he showed me plans he had made for another customer. It all looked great except for the price tag- the equivalent of $500, or two month’s salary. A little pricey. I told him what I was willing to pay, and together we whittled down the existing plans, leaving me with a basic but extremely sufficient setup. At the end of an hour, I walked away with a 15W solar panel, a 12V car battery, 20 meters of wire, two fluorescent light bulbs, a wall outlet, and a light switch.

To my slight surprise the electrician showed up at my house the next morning only a couple of hours later than scheduled. You don’t get that punctuality in the States. Of course I was probably his biggest customer of the week, if not the month; very few homes in village can afford even the basic setup that I bought. The first thing he did was raid the garbage fire pit for a nice piece of charred ash. He used this to mark an outline of his plan onto my wall. No measuring tape. No level. No ruler. Just his eyeball. My grandfather, Mr. Fixer-Upper, would have laughed out loud if he had seen this inaccuracy.

With the plans etched in the wall, he went to town…with an axe! He chopped away at the cement layer of my wall creating a trough a couple inches wide and about half as deep. It reached down to the underlying mud brick and ran the height of one wall, along its base, around the corner, and up the next wall. He widened and deepened the trough about halfway up the first wall and at its top and bottom; these spots are where he would later install the light switch and wall plug, and where he would drill a hole through the wall so I could have a light outside. After laying the wire in the trough and cutting it to size, he cemented it all in place, filling in the trough and approximately smoothing the surface by hand. Again, no tools except for a wire cutter.

By this point the job was basically done. His assistant mounted two fluorescent light bulbs- one above my stove and one on the porch- and they added the cover for the wall socket and light switch. All said and done, it was pretty cool. All I had to do to get power was hook up the car battery to the wires that run straight out of the wall (right through the cement…no fancy cover or anything). When the battery runs out of juice, I hook it up to the solar panel and harness the sun’s energy from my front yard. The setup is a bit crude, and now I have the remnants of the trough to paint, but hey, it works! I’ve been using the light for an hour or two for over a week now and haven’t had to recharge the battery yet.

Does this mean you can come over, eat microwave nachos, drink a cold margarita from my blender, and watch a movie in surround sound? Not exactly. All those fancy appliances would drain my battery faster than you can say “Ouagadougou”. What it does mean is that I can make dinner (usually rice or pasta), read a book, and see my guitar music after watching the sunset. However, despite having access to this cutting-edge technology, my favorite nighttime activity is still sitting on my front porch and admiring the stars. I have yet to see a movie or read a book that equals the magnificence and splendor of Nature’s nightly feature.