And God Said "Let There Be Light"

So I might have shared this a little bit, but I thought I would take time to explain how electricity works in Nigeria. We call electricity “NEPA” because that was the name of the electricity company. It is still called NEPA even though the company changed its name.

There is no rhyme or reason to when we have electricity. The weather doesn’t really play a factor. The amount of NEPA we have one day may or may not be the same the next day. I can honestly say that I only remember one or two days in the entire time I have been here that I think we had NEPA all day (its possible that we didn’t because I am not inside all day). In the beginning it is difficult, but soon you learn to adjust to the unreliability of it. Many people in Nigeria, like us, have a generator to help with the lack of electricity. Most businesses will run their generators all day, but individual homes ration out their generator usage. The houses on our compound chose to only run it from 6:30-10pm if there isn’t NEPA during that time. Of course with the cost of fuel going up, we do not really enjoy spending the money on using the generator, but we have a guarantee that we will have power for at least 4 hours each day and we don’t have to spend all night in the dark.

From time to time, NEPA is really bad. A couple weeks ago, we had about 4 hours of NEPA in 3 days. This doesn’t do much to keep the food in the fridge and freezer fresh. Sometimes we have to use the freezer as a refrigerator.

I have tried to understand what it is that makes NEPA the way it is. The best explanation that I have been given is that there are so many people in Nigeria (it’s the most populous nation in Africa) that we just don’t have the resources to provide power all the time to everybody. So there is power sharing of sorts. Of course, one of the ridiculous things is that Nigeria also provides power for neighboring countries AND they don’t have the same problems with lack of electricity like we do. There have been rumors that one of these countries has been cut off from our power. I’m sure that they aren’t happy about it, but we have seen a definite improvement here.

Now even with this detailed explanation, I have found with the many visitors here that you cannot fully appreciate the joys of NEPA until you come here. Even people from other West African countries think they understand issues with electricity, but they always return home with a new found appreciation for what they got.

**disclaimer** This is only the case for the cities and towns. No bush villages have any electricity and some West African countries also have no electricity. Just so you know that there is always someone worse off.