By Ivy Chibanda
The buzz of my landlord’s fridge is what I hope to hear when I wake up, and when I don’t hear it, it might be because it has decided to ‘rest’ for a moment, or it means ZESA has definitely done what it does best, cutting power.
I used to know it as load shedding but I don’t think it still is load shedding when everyone in every part of the country is complaining.
Waking up to no power definitely means cold cereal (that’s if it’s the first two weeks of the month, because towards the end of the month, the coffers are dry), and when there’s no cereal, it means we are going with nothing in the stomach to the lectures.
As if that’s not enough, we have to go with a cold bath and it simply is hard to bath with cold water in the cold mornings, especially when using the bucket, a cold shower is better but at times the city council decides to save the water as well so sometimes we just have to use the bucket. The bath I dread the most.
Having had survived the bath, one has to make sure they have a dollar in the pocket for buying lunch because you never know when uncle ZESA decides to bring back the power so if you don’t buy lunch and you are going to wait for power in the evening, it might just mean you will have a zero-zero-one.
Because the campus has a generator, we all carry our laptops to the campus to charge them so we can use the laptops for our assignments and studying when we get back home but then it is again a problem.
During the day, the generator only powers up electricity to the computer labs and admin blocks where power is mostly needed and not at the hostels. Therefore, there is a shortage of power points and not everyone gets to charge their laptops.
One cannot entirely blame the university for not having the whole campus powered by the generator; surely they would be operating at a loss having to buy thousands of litres of fuel every day.
Now that our laptops are not charged, at the end of the day, we have to carry them back home, powerless and we have to wait and wait, with grumbling stomachs, for ZESA to bring us power. At times we have to go to sleep without power and hope and pray that electricity comes back, else we have a night without supper.
When power gets back, maybe after ten, we have to wake up, charge the gadgets and cook supper and at times lunch for the following day because you can never be assured that there will be electricity the following day and you want to save a dollar tomorrow, you can’t be forking out a dollar everyday at lunch time.
Nowadays, it’s rare to find someone running out of groceries because they rarely cook, they buy cooked food and at times at not so safe places, because at the safe places, demand is higher than supply.
At the end of the day, you find it useless to buy more groceries and save that money for a rainy day or may I say rainy days because everyday is the same.
My landlady recently told me to find something to do with our meat, because our meat was spoiling her fridge. Now what would we do with sixteen packets of meat within a day? Maybe we should have given her some, am only thinking of that now.
This means we can no longer buy meat in bulk and we have to buy meat everyday, which is quite expensive, that would mean using two dollars a day which simply takes us off budget.
That’s the life of a student nowadays, there’s no time for rest, because during the day you are in school and at night you are busy cooking, and working on the assignments because electricity is no excuse for not submitting an assignment in time.
We might not be the only ones facing the problem but surely there should be some sort of exemption for the students, the situation only gets worse.
I really wonder what life will be like during exam time. Life gets harder each and every day and as much as we might be getting used to it, it’s not a kind of life one should get used to. We can only hope for a better tomorrow.
You can visit Ivy Chibanda’s blog Ms. Resolute
