Months Without Light: My Experience Living Without Electricity

Electricity is an essential part of human life in this day and age. Given the fact that we're currently in the digital age, it's obvious digitalization can't materialize without electricity. That's to show how important electricity is to modern life, yet unfortunately not everyone gets to enjoy it fully; in fact, some people have gone months without access to electricity. This is not the way to go, and there's a need for change because we no longer live in the time where electricity was a luxury; electricity has gone past that to become a necessity, without which most things won't function at all.

The above stated have established the fact that electricity is a core part of the modern world because it's the heart of literally most appliances in the house, offices, and several other places. Having to live without it means you'll have to manually do the majority of the things modern appliances do for you with ease, like washing the dishes, doing laundry, and freezing food and drinks amongst many other things. Seeing this particular prompt amongst the highlighted topics for the week, I find it easy to talk about this one because I've actually gone months without electricity in my neighborhood; in fact, the last time we had electricity was sometime in August of 2025.

Since then, life has been nothing short of frustrating for me and my neighbor due to the fact that the majority of the things we do and items we use depend on electricity. And now that we don't have it, we've no choice but to find a way around it, which is finding a way around the situation so we can at least have some kind of access to electricity to charge our phones, light up the house, and the like. For me personally, in the early stage of this blackout, I had to find ways of charging my phone, and to do that, I often go around the world with my phone charger, power bank, and rechargeable lamp that I can charge at the office, so it can come in handy in the night and to recharge my phone when the battery is down before the next day.

Despite the fact that the above habits help during the week, the weekend seems longer because I end up not having ways to charge my phone, power bank, or the lamp that lights up my house, and so I realized I need to take swift action to get electricity into my house, and that's how I ended up taking a loan to purchase a solar system and a generator. The solar system helps generate a minimum amount of electricity that powers basic appliances within the house, and it is clean energy, while the generator, on the other hand, needs petrol (gas) to be powered, and we all know petrol is quite expensive, so I mostly just use it during the weekend to do laundry and perform other things around the house.

All photos are mine.