Life Without Electricity

At 5:00 AM this morning I woke up. I was covered in sweat and I felt a bit disoriented. I wasn’t having a nightmare; I was just really hot and uncomfortable. I lay in bed for about ten minutes, trying to go back to sleep, and I eventually gave up. I felt like I was in a sauna, except that there was no cold pool I could go jump into in the next room over. Right when as I sat up I got tangled in my mosquito net, and after flailing around I eventually emerged from my bug free chamber and tried to find the light switch. I stumbled around, knocking into my bed and my chair, eventually finding wall and the light switch. Click….. Nothing. Click-click-click? Still nothing. My eyes had adjusted a little at this point and I looked at my ceiling to roughly make out the shape of my fan sitting motionless. This could only mean one thing. The power was dead.

The electricity situation at the mission is pretty complicated. We are hooked up to the public electricity, which I have deemed “Haiti Power”. I joke that Haitian power runs on Haitian time. It will eventually come on, but it might be late. Sometimes its off for an hour at a time, other times its off for a few days at a time. To supplement the power when Haiti power is off the mission has installed twelve solar panels. These solar panels charge two banks of batteries that have a combined power capacity of about 1400 Amp/hours. How quickly these 1400 Amp hours last depends on how much power the mission is using. When volunteer groups are here, the batteries will usually last for about three or four hours. When there are no groups here (like right now) they should last the entire night, though that’s not always the case, as last night demonstrated. An average day’s worth of sun can easily charge the entire battery bank, so we will always have power during the day when the sun is out, but once the sun sets, the batteries have nothing charging them. If they die, we have two diesel generators we can turn on that will provide the mission with the power it needs and charge the batteries. One generator is supposed to turn on automatically when the batteries reach a certain capacity, but for some reason the automatic start did not work this morning.

This inconsistent electricity is a pain, but at the end of the day it’s not that big of a deal. The only time it really bothers me is when I either can’t get my work done or I can’t talk with friends and family at home. Not having my fan running while I sleep or having to take a shower by flashlight is a minor inconvenience in comparison. 

This experience however has taught me an interesting lesson about the importance of electricity in our lives, and what living without it really means. Electricity is connected to almost everything productive we do. Without electricity and the only source of light being the sun, your day is over when the sun sets. You can’t really see enough to do anything productive at night, even if there is a full moon. This is not too difficult for the rural farmers, since they begin their day at dawn to avoid working in the hot afternoon hours, but it poses a big problem to the students who have homework to do and can’t finish it before sun down. When the students study for the state exams, they will often huddle together under a flashlight in order to work after dark.

The inconsistent supply of electricity also causes an inconsistent supply of water, this is why the only source of water beyond the streams and rivers is the water gathered from manual hand pumps. Though electrical pumps would be much less labor intensive, they are impractical because they would only work when the power worked. If the power was out for two days (which has been the case on multiple occasions), no one could get water for two days. The only reliable way to supply a community with water is, unfortunately, with a manually operated hand pump.

Probably the most significant consequence of this lack of power is that everyone has to basically learn to function without electricity. The school buildings have these large windows built in that let in lots of sun light in, and only two of the classrooms have any electrical hook up in them at all. Any profession that requires electricity is simply not possible to perform in the rural areas. All of the masonry, carpentry, and plumbing, students have to learn to work completely without electricity. The seamstresses and tailors all have to use mechanical sewing machines powered with a foot pedal to do all of their sewing. Any profession that requires the use of information technology is simply not possible in La Croix. The computers would not only go for days without power, but the power is so sporadic to begin with, they would randomly shut off, creating a huge data loss problem.

This inability to reliably and consistently deliver electricity greatly hamper’s Haiti’s capacity to develop. This problem not only plagues La Croix and the rural areas. During Aristide’s reign in the 1990’s and the early 2000’s he promised to deliver 24-hour electricity to the urban slums. This was one of Aristide’s many lofty goals, and like so many of the goals Aristide set forward, it was not realized. There are some technological implementations that could be made to improve the rural area’s access to electricity. If more homes had solar panels, they could potentially gain access to a reliable source of power, but this would be extremely difficult. Property rights are already very shaky in Haiti, and I feel that people would have a very difficult time protecting something as valuable as solar panels from theft or vandalism. This problem is one that must be met not only by the people but by the government. The government must either figure out how to adequately and equitably distribute power to the people of the rural areas, or secure property rights and up hold the rule of law fairly enough so that some firm can equitably supply people with the electricity they need.

I have hope for Haiti. Since I got here last September the main highway has improved dramatically. Improving a public highway is a little more complicated than developing an an electrical grid, but the political infrastructure needed to build a new road is the same infrastructure needed to supply people with consistent and reliable electricity. It might not be in a year, but I hope that in the next few years the rural farmers in La Croix will be able to install lights in their homes that can turn on when they flick the switch. In the mean time I just have to keep a flashlight closer to my bed.