Lights out

One of my first orders of business when I moved into the house was to fix the hall and bathroom light as well replace an old outlet and install a new outlet in our kitchen (for a fridge which we will finally get in July!!!  Prepare yourselves for another food post after we’ve broken it in).  This was my first lesson in the Mozambican handyman.  Having no idea where to find an “electrician” to do this work, I asked my neighbor to refer me to someone.  He gladly gave me the name and number of a friend who he said was “training” to be an electrician.  I give the guy a call and he shows up to my house to take a look. Between my awful Portuguese and some interpretive dancing, I finally get him to understand what I want done.  He agrees to meet me at the market the next afternoon to buy his supplies.  Only three days after our first interaction, he is hard at work wiring my house.  I didn’t appreciate until later just how fast that is in Mozambique.

            There really is no “code” in Mozambique, doesn’t matter if your changing a lightbulb, building a house, or teaching the future leaders of the country.  At least if there is, it’s in a yellowed binder gathering dust somewhere… or being used to light someone’s carvão... Anyways, “electricians” in this country don’t find it necessary to shut off the power to before stripping wires and removing old outlets.  He got a lot of amusement from my jumping everytime something popped or sparked.  I’m sorry if I don’t want to watch someone get fried in my own house.

            Planning ahead really isn’t something many Mozambicans have mastered, either.  Even though I had long since realized that about the only “training” this guy had was on how to complete a circuit (if I had known this was the only requirement for calling yourself an electrician, I would have done all this myself… after I disconnected the power), I continued to serve as his assistant and let him make all the major decisions.  Until we got to the hall light, that is.  The wire was fried towards the circuit box so it needed to be replaced before we could install the new light fixture.  We didn’t know about the faulty wire until after we had gone to the market and so we only had about 1.5 meters of wire left over from installing the kitchen outlet.  I figured this was fine because it really didn’t matter how far down the hall the light ended up being so long as it was in the hall.  But the “electrician” was determined to keep it in its orginal place.  Mind you, all the wiring for houses here is just tacked to the wall, so it’s not like we were comitted to using preexisting holes in dry wall.

            As he started tacking up the wire in the hall and working back towards the circuit box, I expressed my concern that we weren’t going to have enough wire to go all the way and we should move the light closer… or start from the circuit box and work down the hallway… I was politely ignored until we reached the circuit box.  Actually until we ran out of wire about 5” from the box.  Rather than re-lay the wire, we went out and bought more wire which he used to patch the gap between the wire and the circuit box. He was kind enough to insulate the now exposed, live wires in my hallway with plastic bag scraps…

            Story two actually begins as Mireya’s first dealings with a Mozambican “electrician” in July of last year.  We are used to losing power fairly frequently so Mireya and our neighbors thought nothing of it last year when the power went out.  It wasn’t until after a week or so that they realized that it wasn’t our entire neighborhood that had lost power, just our house and their house.  Dutifully, Mireya called EDM (Energia de Moçambique) to ask for a technician… and she called again… and she called again… and again.  After about 2 weeks without power, she finally decided to call the “electrician” a friend of the neighbor’s had recommended.  He came almost immediately, recognized the problem, opened some boxes, jiggled some wires, and Mireya had power again.

            Now fast forward to my arrival.  Electricity here is pre-paid.  You have to go to the local EDM office to purchase kW, then go home and enter a code from the receipt into the box that connects your house to the grid.   When you use up your pre-paid amount, your energy shuts off.  When I showed up, I could not figure out how to read that box for the life of me.  The only number that was in kW was negative, which made absolutely no sense, so I was left with a guessing game of when my power would run out.  When Mireya came back, we bought a couple hundred mets worth of kW but we decided to just keep the receipt handy for when the energy finally ran out.  Four months passed and we still had power.  Mireya had never calculated how much energy she used so we just chocked up our low usage to not having a fridge or a TV. 

            Then an EDM representive showed up at our house during a random inspection of all the units in our neighborhood.  I obligingly showed him all of the receipts that Mireya had kept for energy purchased within the last year and things were going great until he asked to see our box in the back of our house.  That’s when we learned the reason for our power never running out.  Apparently, the “electrician” that had fixed the box almost a year before hadn’t just fixed it, he had rigged it to bypass the whole credit system.  We had been stealing electricity.  The ironic part is, except for the last few months, Mireya had been dutifully buying and entering energy, not knowing that it wouldn’t “run out.”  It took all of our feminine, foreign power to keep the technician from cutting our energy right then and there.  Not that he didn’t have the right cut our power, but we knew that as soon as he did, it could be weeks before we won the fight to get it back.  So for now, we’re enjoying our “free” electricity until the technician comes back to reconnect our box the correct way.