Darkness Falls
We have had regular power cuts here in Dakar (and presumably across Senegal) for the past week. The cuts have been anywhere from 2 hours to 12 hours. The reasons for the cuts are not certain but basically it seems to be a money issue. One of the 50MW generators broke down in December and they have been limping along since then. Now they are in a money bind because there isn't enough money to run all the backup generators (they actually had a backup plan?) and there certainly isn't enough to fix the broken one. There is also some dispute over money owed between the oil refinery and the power company. No one really understands what is going on but we are assuming that this will all be magically fixed just before the presidential elections coming up soon. For right now Senelec is claiming this will continue indefinitely. In any case we are surviving right now because it is actually not hot here at all. We have had wonderful cool weather which means we don't even need fans at night.
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