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Electricity in Khartoum cannot be bought on a trust basis. You pay first and use later. Payment is made in a large white tiled air conditioned room with hints of off green on the peripheries of your vision to create a sense of an unclean hospital room, (eerily similar to most decor in Khartoum). Two woman sit in next door cubicles in the centre of a row of twelve or so empty ones, they are among the fastest typers I have ever seen either side of the Atlantic. Every time I have been there (which admittedely is less than my flatmate duty dictates) there has never been a need for more than this island of two. Rush hour is when the office closes, at 9.30pm. This is usually the time you see rickshaws, cars and taxis swoop up onto the pavement and sand banks only to gurgitate out a frantic punter clasping their cash to their bosom as they sprint for the door. Or in my case hobble (my knee again - this time from rugby and volleyball) from down the road where we live.
Payment is made in cash only (as with everything for foreigners here due to the american embargo and the subsequent moratorium on visa and mastercard) you hand over your numbers (everyone’s a number here) to identify your account and then reluctantly your cash and watch their fingers fly. They print out a receipt with how many KWh you are now the proud owner of and with a special code that only you, you happy few, possess. Off you trot back to your flat, happy at the thought of all those electrons waiting to bounce around in your building, where a little white innocuous box awaits you and your new twenty digit code.
This is usually where the story ends, there are variations on the theme, your walk back to the house may be populated with images of a stray dog being licked by the donkey that is tied to the rubbish heap next to the building site where the IDPs work. You may be accosted by a security guard practising his english, you may even trip over a rise in the sand and narrowly miss a tree because you were trying to work out where the moon was but couldn’t see it for the clouds that have finally come with the beginning of the rainy season. But for the last you’d have to be a bit of a space cadet.
But usually the story ends happily, you get home, you plug in the code, the numbers flash and rise magically and you go to bed, safe in the knowledge that tonight your ac will be working, tonight your fan will helicopter gracefully above your bed, forever populating your room with air currents. Last night however things didn’t work out quite as expected. I had people round to play risk, my flatmate (who was staying at a friends) had bought the electricity and texted me the code. At 12.30am the risk game ended. By about 1.00 the minimum obligatory cleaning was done, by 1.30am I had hunted down and killed as many of the mosquitoes that I could find that had gotten in with the smokers from the balcony. Life was good, all was as it should be, by about 2am I was ready to doze off. I turned off my lights, dimmed down the music on my ipod, cuddle my 10 or so pillows and slowly drifted off to the caress of the cool air from the ac behind me.
At 6.30 am this morning, Khartoum was blessed with the sight of me clutching a bag and a pillow, wild eyed and delirious, stumbling through empty streets unwitnessed save by the crowded early morning buses that drive by with their doors perpetually open and packed with people leaning at perfect angles towards the air giving windows to the point where they look like an experiment with internal perspective. As I said, at 6.30 am this morning I made it to my office before writing the below email to my flatmate and landlord :
