Utilities and traffic

We received a water bill last week. 837 shillings. That's about 56 cents. When you subtract the 600 shillings in service charges for the man to read our water meter, that should give you an idea of how scarce water has been at our house over the past month or so. The electricity bill tells a pretty similar story. It's really amazing how cheap utilities are when they're switched off most of the time. Fortunately, the rains have been pretty strong the past few weeks, so it seems like the hydropower stations and water supply should be recharged moving forward. There was a deceptive period shortly after the rains began when power was reliable, but it returned to the heavily rationed state shortly after that. The rumor going around is that some important dignitary was in Arusha, so they skipped the rationing plan for that week. I'm confident that the rumor is true because I was also in a daladala last week and the traffic police held up traffic on 3 legs of one of the main roundabouts during rush hour and only let traffic coming through one direction for about 15 minutes.

On an unrelated note, The Economist just had an interesting piece on urban water management in Cambodia.