Heart of darkness

Sunday, 21 February 2010

Heart of darkness

Wasfi Al Nider sits motionless on a couch with his legs stretched, looking at a small screen. Whenever it goes blank, it is the sign of yet another power cut hitting Gaza. But unlike the frustrations of thousands of others working on computers or watching TV, the screen the 63-year-old is looking at is connected to his blood and a kidney dialysis machine.
“Whenever there is a blackout, I’m in Allah’s hands,” Wasfi says. “The machine just stops, blood stops circulating, I just cry. Then we have to wait until the generator starts.”
Over the last two months, blackouts have increased so much in Gaza that Wasfi and the 200 other kidney dialysis patients frequenting Al Shifa Hospital three times a week for four-hour rounds of treatment have been witnessing their screens going blank almost every time. The frequent blackouts have rendered many of the hospital’s emergency battery backups useless:
“Many of our battery backups need repairing, and getting spare parts is a big problem; we’ve been waiting for a year for some of the items,” says Dr Mohammed Shatat, the director of the kidney dialysis department, who besides the nightmare of stocking medical supplies for his patients under the Israeli blockade, has to think of coping with the daily blackouts. At the same hospital, his colleagues at the cardiac and surgery departments work with the same trepidation of facing a blackout during critical moments of their work.
The steep increase in blackouts since the EU stopped funding fuel for the Gaza Power Plant has plunged the entire coastal strip in total darkness for up to 12 hours a day, disrupting the daily lives of Palestinians beyond the hardships imposed by the Israeli blockade.
While most of the shops and offices in Gaza were already equipped with generators, many Palestinians are now buying portable generators imported through the tunnels for their homes, fuelled by cheap diesel coming through the same underground lifelines.
The owner of a store selling generators in Gaza City says sales have increased by 70% in the last month. With 1Kw machines selling at around NIS470 (€92), one can generate enough energy with one litre of fuel to switch on the lights, a television set and recharge the mobile for three hours.
But this cheap energy alternative is not without its downsides. A repair shop nearby, which has just been converted from a grocery store a month ago, is full of faulty generators, most of them less than a month old, while others arrive damaged from the tunnels.
“I switched on mine twice since I bought it,” says Abu Raed, a taxi driver who just brought his generator to be repaired. “They’re too cheap and frail to keep up with all the blackouts we’re getting.”
For others living in poverty, generators are still too expensive to buy. “In one month I make about NIS100 and have 18 family members to sustain, how can I afford a NIS470 generator besides the fuel and maintenance?” says 26-year-old Ibrahim, a bachelor still living with his family and the only one to have a job. “We have to make do with a kerosene lamp. With no gas available, we cook on firewood in the back yard and huddle in one room whenever it’s cold.”
It is not just the poor who cannot afford generators. At the Shanti Express laundry and dry clean, an industrial generator keeps the services going although even here, the problems persist. Massive washing machines have to restart the washing programme from scratch whenever there is a blackout, wasting much more water, time and energy.
“We can’t always switch on the generator because we share it with the entire building block and it doesn’t depend on us,” says Ayman Al Shanti. “We miss lots of deadlines because of the electricity problems, most of our work gets disrupted, and whenever we have a faulty machine it takes time to get spare parts, but the people understand the situation.”
The Israeli blockade had already made Shanti’s business face an uphill climb. One barrel of dry cleaning material from Israel used to cost him NIS1,800. Nowadays it costs him NIS5,000 per gallon – or one-tenth of the amount he used to get – to import supplies from the tunnels.
Even at the high class Al Deira Hotel – a little gem in the midst of Gaza overlooking the Mediterranean and whose only visitors in the last four years have been journalists and foreign aid workers – electricity is a nightmare.
“We have to guarantee service, but it’s not easy to generate power with all these blackouts,” says Deputy General Manager Tamer Barakat, who says the hotel is now spending around US$3,000 a month on fuel for the generator. “Our generator is meant to give a couple of hours of uninterrupted power for all our 22 rooms, the cold store, laundry and restaurant, but when you end up using it every day it becomes a problem.”
The blackouts are surely no excuse for the faithful to miss their prayers. Sheikh Abu Rashed keeps a generator always on standby at the Al Khatiba mosque whenever he is about to call the faithful for prayers five times a day through the speakers on the minaret, while other muezzins have connected hand-held megaphones to make ensure their calls make it through the sandy streets of Gaza.
The widespread use of generators is also claiming the lives of Palestinians through fires and carbon monoxide poisoning in cases where generators are left inside. A total of 15 people died and 27 were injured since January in generator-related accidents at home, according to Director of Emergency Services Muawiya Hassanein. Last year, generator fires and carbon monoxide poisoning claimed the lives of 75 people.
Last year, even before the Gaza energy crisis started, it was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who described the Hamas-ruled coastal strip as “the emirate of darkness”. Today, few Gazans argue with that, as the migraine-inducing sounds of generators overwhelm the strip inhabited by 1.5 million Palestinians.
“I can barely sleep with the sound of generators at night,” said Mahmoud, a refugee from Jabalia Camp. “You can smell fuel wherever you go in Gaza. We’re inhaling all sorts of shit.”

http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/2010/02/21/t16.html
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