49th, 50th & 51st outage

Yesterday afternoon when I got home around 4.00 pm the power had gone

off since about at least an hour before which would be around 3.00 pm.

Ringing the various engineers like Mr. Mbaluka and Mr. Musau got no
answer so I tried Ms. Faith Njuguna's number. While she responded
immediately, at first, she had no idea that our power was gone and why.
She promised to revert back to me after finding out.

She did and this time they blamed the wind! I wonder how often the power
goes off in places which experiences stronger winds than Mombasa?
Anyway, as usual no time frame was given as to when normalcy would resume.

This being Ramadhan when like me many other residents of Nyali are
fasting, our time for cooking our evening meal is usually around this
time - mid-afternoon. And those of us who make use of electricity to
cook get totally messed up with such an outage.

I told Faith this and while she understood this, she was completely
helpless. I told her that I have, like many other consumers, noticed
that every year during the month of Ramadhan, both of our two service
providers, the water guys and KPLC are especially awful despite requests
every year being made by various Muslim bodies to these two, to please,
keep outages to a minimum and to the water company that it should give a
reliable supply. And like always, she denied this, like her colleagues.

But, like other requests, all of them fall on deaf and uncaring ears and
forget about being fewer - they mysteriously increase to an offensive
number, like yesterday and this morning.

Back to yesterday - the power came back about 20 minutes to 6.00 pm and
went off yet again, about half an hour later not to return till after
nearly an hour. All these timings coincided with our preparing our meal,
opening our fasts, praying and having our meal.

And all the time, the showground racket which is dependent on a reliable
power supply was going on in full swing! How come they never have an
interruption like us? At least, then we would get some much needed
relief from an irritating and disturbing non-stop noise about which NEMA
seems to be helpless in taking action despite their noise pollution law.

But, the 51st outage happened this morning. Again calling any of the
KPLC numbers proved futile, but, fortunately it came back within a few
minutes. Why it had gone is anybody's guess, of course.