The one overwhelming thing that I have noticed about living in a developing country this week is that a lot of things are just sort of inconvenient. It makes me realize that growing up I basically had everything at my fingertips all of the time and that living in a place where the power is always on, food and water are typically in stock, and a constant stream of natural gas is available for my cooking needs is pretty nice.
There have been a number of incidents that have made me think twice (or three times or five times) about this question of convenience. Right now, for example, I am sitting in the dark because the power has been randomly turned off again. SENELEC has some problems keeping up with the bills, so the government tends to shut off the electricity. They turn it off in phases so that only a couple neighborhoods are affected at a time, but sometimes there are multiple outages in a day and sometimes the outages last for hours at a time. It is unpredictable to say the least. The power has been on much more consistently in the past week or two, especially when compared to the middle and end of September. But even still, it goes out fairly regularly. Saturday night it also went out, as I was sitting enjoying a nice beer at a bar in my neighborhood aptly called Le Mermoz (Mermoz being the neighborhood I live in...). Obviously life goes on and in that instance the bartender pulled out some lamps and we continued our merrymaking, but sometimes it is much more difficult to do things in half darkness. I know that electricity is not a necessity and that I was fortunate to grow up in a place that has it nearly 100% of the time. Actually, it's a bit funny because for the first month and a little bit that I was here, when the outages were especially frequent, they didn't really bother me at all. But now they're wearing on my nerves ever so slightly because they're so infrequent that I let my guard down, only to be thrust into darkness when I am least expecting it. It's really fairly bratty of me to be annoyed about the outages, but there's something really unpleasant about it getting dark at 7:30 and then having to rely on my headlamp for light while I go about my business.
Senegal has a pretty significant energy crisis. They are a petroleum importing country that depends on a lot of big Western businesses to supply gas and oil. This morning I saw a newspaper headline about how most of the big gas importers- Total, Shell, etc- are dry for the time being. When Senegal doesn't pay its bills, the gas sits on ships in Dakar's harbor. And sometimes the ships don't even make it that far. Last week my brother ran around for almost two hours looking for gas for our stove. Many Senegalese families use gas burners similar to camp stoves for all their cooking and my family is no exception. With the gas shortages of late, it has on occasion become nearly impossible to find gas for cooking. We were completely out one day last week and he had to go all the way to Liberte 6 (another neighborhood that is a twenty to thirty minute walk away) to get gas. In fact, Liberte 6 made the news that night for having received a large shipment of gas, basically the only neighborhood on the whole peninsula to have done so. People flocked from everywhere to get their hands on it. It really puts things in perspective. People in the US would laugh about the prospect of having to go further than the corner Holiday station store for gas. It is just so convenient living in a really rich country where we don't even have to ask where the next shipment of gas or oil is going to come from. And it is so inconvenient to have to worry about whether or not there will be gas available to cook tonight's dinner.
And then comes the question of water. In Dakar the water is almost always on, but somedays it is inexplicably very unavailable. There was one Saturday about a month ago when the water was off for the entire city for a few hours. None of us ever figured out why, but it was really inconvenient for people who were trying to cook dinner and for people who had just returned from the beach and really needed to wash the sand out of their hair.
It is also interesting to see the problems in the supply chain that exist for the average business in Senegal. Last week every boutique (small shops on the corner of almost every street) in my neighborhood was out of 10L bottles of mineral water, a product that is common. At Le Mermoz on Saturday night, a friend of mine had to request three different kinds of soda pop before arriving at one that the bar actually had. At restaurants it's common to get a menu only to try to order and be told that the kitchen literally has two or three items available. It's hard to tell if these types of incidents are the result of poor supply chain management, goods shortages, or if there's a completely different reason that I can't even imagine. Whatever it is, it always causes a little laugh when one of us tries to get one of our top five options at a restaurant or bar and can't manage.
So yes, convenience is lacking in a lot of ways. It is usually just sort of hilarious. Most people on my program seem to take it in sort of a 'why am I not surprised that this isn't working right now' way. It also makes me feel like a privileged brat that I am so accustomed to always having things at my fingertips. I take that back, it makes me grateful that the US has the infrastructure it does. It's just so convenient to be able to turn on a light at night, have my fan on while I sleep, and order most anything I want at restaurants. Being here proves that these luxuries are in no way necessary, but that it is really a luxury in itself to not have to worry about the day-to-day stuff of life.
No comments:
Post a Comment