Who needs electricity?

What happens if you don’t pay your electricity bill?

Well your mail from United Utilities may turn a bit red. If you’re not careful you risk a sharp phone call or two. If you really fail to pay you endanger your credit rating.

The ultimate sanction is for the power company to stop their service – to ‘cut you off’. Fortunately that’s pretty rare – after all, we accept electricity as a fundamental requirement for living. We need it to run essentials like flatscreen tellies and hairdryers (along with little luxuries like lighting and heating).

At least, that’s how it is for a householder in somewhere like the UK. But what if the customer is a hospital. And you’re in Cambodia?

Well, one thing is your ‘need’ is pretty great. Your lights aren’t just for reading to the kids, they allow midwives to deliver them. The machines being powered are xrays not xboxes.

And yet, rather than being seen as somehow more important than a private home, when my hospital got into a dispute with the local generator company over unpaid bills, what did those with the power do?

That’s right - they pulled the plug on the entire site! Can you imagine the scandal if a power company cut off your local hospital? It’s unthinkable, and rightly so. Sure, we must all pay our dues. But never should disputes get to the stage that the ultimate sanction is enacted. That would be stupid, not to mention immoral. But it’s exactly what just happened here.

So I now work in a hospital which has no electricity. Well, that’s not quite true – we do have an ‘emergency’ diesel generator, and this is begrudgingly booted if a pesky patient needs an xray (and casually cranked whenever a government bigwig needs fanning).

It's little consolation that I'm now receiving better-late-than-never praise for getting some solar power working in the hospital. Thanks to generous donations from back home we replaced the batteries in 4 wards just last month, and persuaded the donor to install panels on the new surgery unit at the last moment. Why oh why isn’t solar fitted as standard on important buildings in a country with such poor infrastructure yet such brilliant sunshine?

As weeks turn to months we seem to be no nearer a solution, and it’s getting more and more difficult to look after patients. Even a low tech hospital uses electricity for a surprising number of things. When Katja asked the nurses why there was no documentation for a women who had been beaten almost to death by her husband, they had a novel excuse – how could they keep records when they can no longer use the photocopier? Even more basic: the new children’s ward has a scruffy handwritten note on the locked door to its beautifully appointed new toilet block: “no power, no water, no entry”.

What can I do? Well, I’ve tried to understand what caused the initial dispute, but having asked ten times I’ve now heard a dozen different stories, and sense I’m no nearer the truth. The bottom line is that if they thought I could assist they would have asked me by now. One thing I’ve learned here is that trying to impose my ‘help’ when it’s not asked for will only make my colleagues embarrassed and me frustrated.

So I gave a big sweaty shrug (no power means no fans either), and carried on. Maybe it’s not so bad. For one, our hospital doesn’t have much fancy electrical equipment - very few 'things that go bing'. What’s more, electricity isn’t the only source of power - small bits of kit often use batteries, and the fridges in the lab actually run from gas cylinders. We certainly don’t need heating, but cooling would be nice, and the fans do need power - but they weren't turned on for patients even before we were cut off (“too expensive”). And lights aren’t really used much either – when it’s dark you go to bed, don’t you?

Nevertheless, I really hope we get our electric back soon, not least for the selfish reason that I want an office with power. If not, future blogs may need solar internet or gas-powered computers. Dare I suggest my blogging may be a little like my power supply – it may not light up your world, but you might just miss it if someone pulls the plug.