Living in darkness, but seeing hope
For the first time in 26 years, the electricity came on in Hayes Lewis’ modest house in this cluttered Monrovia suburb.
The very next day, Lewis went out and purchased a television set, a fan and a single light bulb. The purchases cost him $250 — about a quarter of a year’s income for the 62-year-old jack-of-all-trades.
But it was money Lewis had been longing to spend. He remembers the time back in 1990 when the warlord Prince Johnson’s forces took over the area and fighting destroyed the nearby Mount Coffee hydroelectric plant, cutting off electricity — or, as Liberians call it, “current.”
“To have current, tha’ not small thing,” he said in Liberian English, motioning proudly at the light bulb in his bedroom.
Except the light bulb was dark, the fan was still and the television screen was blank because the electricity, after making its much heralded return, had gone out again.
On New Year’s Day, a bandit trying to steal the copper wire from one of the light poles at the newly reopened Mount Coffee Hydropower Plant had electrocuted himself, prompting the shutdown of huge swaths of the system. Five days later, Lewis once again had no current. I asked him what he was going to do. Shrugging, Lewis trudged outside and put a large rectangular object on the table. “I wi’ use Chinese lantern,” he said, resignedly. After 26 years, the irony of the situation was beyond him. He supposedly had current, but he was still using the same makeshift battery light.
But that is all par for the course here in this country that, 13 years after the civil war ended, is still trying to put back together the pieces that the war ripped apart. Fourteen years of war snuffed out 200,000 lives and laid waste to Liberia, producing generals who led ritual sacrifices of children before going into battle, naked except for shoes and a gun.
By the time the war was finally over in 2003 and former president Charles Taylor was escorted out of the country, to eventually face a war crimes conviction, the country was left a shell. Current was gone, taking with it running water, street lights, and the simple assumptions of everyday life.
Liberians, as they have for decades, simply adapted. They acquired Tiger batteries, the lower-cost alternative to expensive generators, and used those to plug in their cellphones. Those cellphones they then used to light their way at night, as they travelled in the dark along rural roads and city streets.
They bought so-called Chinese lanterns every other day. In Liberia, the phrase “Chinese lantern” does not apply to silk-and-satin-covered red and gold lights. Instead, it is an ugly square or rectangular batterypowered light.
When President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf arrived at the Mount Coffee plant on a Friday in December to flick the switch that would officially signal the reopening of the plant, it was a big deal here.
The U.S., Germany, Norway and the European Investment Bank contributed to the $357-million (U.S.) project. Finally, last summer, neighbourhoods like Lewis’ began getting hooked up to the electrical grid, in anticipation of the hydropower plant’s reopening.