Joy in Zimbabwe
November 8th, 2009 by Margaret GardnerLast night for the first time in my life I went to bed by candlelight. The electricity supply was down and the generator failed at the guest house where we were staying. I have been to bed by torchlight many times, but as a one-off experience candlelight was much more atmospheric.
Candlelight was an appropriate introduction to my work today.
Imagine a steep mountain. Imagine now that you have to dig a ditch half a metre wide all the way up the mountain in a completely straight line, when you have done that you have to lay a pipe in the trench, then build a house to protect machinery at the bottom, and for doing all of this you don’t get paid at all. In fact you have to supply many of your own materials, carrying them on your back or on your head for up to 15km until you reach the site – even if the material is a huge bag of sand.
You must want some thing very much to do that.
This is what the community I met today have been doing to get electricity to their school.
We don’t think of energy as a basic need, but in truth it is – 90% of the food we eat needs cooking, we need energy for light, heat, to keep medicines cool, we need it to stop the drudgery of the daily search for firewood and the millions of deaths caused by killer smoke.
Have you ever thought what it must be like not to have access to modern energy? Maybe Practical Action should encourage people to go without electricity for a day and be sponsored. I suspect most of us would be surprised at how difficult we would find it.
People without modern energy will go to extraordinary lengths to get it, as I witnessed today.
Mr Shepherd Mutihoto, the Deputy Head Master at the school, said to me, “We are a happy community that Practical Action has brought joy to by allocating to us a micro hydro system”. It was good to think that as well as tackling poverty we are bringing joy.
