In Kenya, you don't immediately assume there is a problem if your city water isn't running or if your electricity goes out. You don't call right away to find out what's going on. Likely, they know you're without service because they're the ones who turned you off. Here, there is rationing of utilities. Backups are a necessity.

The house we are renting has three water storage tanks. There is a huge one underground, with an electric water pump, which pumps water to a second tank in the attic. There isn't great water pressure from the city water supply, so the water comes into the house comes from the upstairs tank, using gravity to create water pressure. The third storage tank collects rain water from the roof and gutters. We have one faucet which is connected directly to the city water supply. Otherwise, all of our water is actually coming from the storage tanks. The underground tank automatically fills itself on days we have water. Since we have the tanks, we don't always notice if it's a water or no-water day, but we seem to have city water running three days a week. Water is life, so most everyone who can afford it has water storage tanks. Those who don't have storage tanks buy water jugs on no-water days, sold by people who have filled them up in neighborhoods that are having a running water day. Those who are even more financially blessed have their own well - a permanent water source.

Electricity is more iffy, but we don't have backup electricity in this house. We usually have electricity, but our neighborhood typically has no power every other Thursday and Friday for about 8 hours a day. Power is also turned off on other days, when there are crews working nearby or when they decide that our neighborhood should be turned off. For our routine power outages, as long as the refrigerator and freezer are relatively full, we don't even have to throw any food out. The problem comes when there is actually something wrong. First of all, we may not realize there is a real problem at first because it very well could be just one of those every-day-nothing's-wrong power outages. Secondly, the crews which are supposed to fix the problems spend their days wasting time so that they can deal with calls after hours and make overtime. Third, if it is a big problem (last week the transformer we are connected to went out), the power company will do everything they can to not actually fix the problem. There is only one electric company in the country. With no competition, they have no motivation to provide good service. We spent the past week without electricity because of this (it's back now, though they didn't exactly fix the issue, rather they bypassed it). Because our water pump is electric, we didn't have any water being pumped to the upstairs storage tank. It was empty after a couple of days of no power, so we also had no water in the house. It made for quite a rugged week (though we spent 3 of the nights away from home).

This brings up two needs for Maisha Kamili, which we had already named, but until we lived here, we had not really experienced: backup water and electricity.

Our goal is to have a permanent water source, but in the absence of that, or until we are able to drill a borehole, we will absolutely have abundant water storage tanks.

We had initially been thinking of getting a backup generator. However, solar power is becoming more and more prevalent in Kenya. Fuel for generators is expensive, but the potent African sun is free. We are leaning more and more towards solar backup, and depending on how reliable it is, we may eventually make solar our primary power source, rather than our backup.