Yasɔ Light Ooo!



When my phone finally attained a “sor” status on Monday morning, everyone who called me went like, “Ablah, why have you gone incommunicado?”

I had a lot of explanation to give to those who claimed I had refused to respond to their WhatsApp messages; those who claimed I had ignored their emails; and texters who belonged to the Viber group.

Not that I had deliberately switched my phone off, or was purposely not responding to messages. My phone entered an era of “dum” on Friday evening.

What happened was that at my time of departing the office on Friday, the battery of my phone had only one bar left.

I was so hopeful of a good charging at home. When I got to my area of residence at around 7:05 p.m. however, I noticed that the entire area was plunged in yawning darkness.

As is the usual thing, I enquired from my next door neighbour who is a stay-at-home-mother what time we were hit with the power cut.

“Sister Ablah, what is happening to this area? What have we done to the ECG? Why are they treating us like this? Power went out at exactly seven thirty this morning. It’s been almost 12 hours and we have had no restoration. What is this?

I have called their customer service line so many times but the lines aren’t going through. Sister we are in trouble in this area oo”.

I could read the frustration on her face as she shook into a good position, her four month old baby, Sheila, who had been tied at her back. “I was even going to stand outside for some fresh air with Sheila when you came in. The weather is extremely warm these days so for some of us, it becomes an issue when ceiling or standing fans cannot function due to the power cut”.

Then running her palms in turn over her fat short arms, she said, “see how heat rashes have crept all over me like a plague. And these days, it’s as though someone had gone up the sky to scrape the surface of the sun. The kind of heat it is emitting is unthinkable”. We both laughed at her statement and her manner of sentence construction.

“Sister Ablah, it’s good you came here. At least, I have laughed a bit. I have been worried the whole day because the little ice my deep freezer managed to produce has all melted. I am seriously hoping power is restored, else all the breast milk I have expressed and kept in it will go bad. So will my fish and chicken”.

My mind went straight on to my own fridge and deep freezer at home. I equally had some fish and chicken in the freezer, and a lot of vegetables in the fridge. I had cooked in bulk the previous week. They were all in the deep freezer. My anxiety began to heighten in respect of the “what ifs”.

What if ECG refused to restore power that evening? What if we went through the same power cut on Saturday? What about Sunday? My thoughts ranted on. But I had to be hopeful. So in the light of optimism, “oh the light will come”, I said to my neighbour.

We had a by-force candle lit dinner at home on Friday night. No power! The entire apartment was as though someone had turned on a heating device in our rooms. And the weather was humid. Sleep was difficult.

When at midnight, Obodai and I couldn’t take the warmth anymore, we both went to have a good bath which resulted in a great time of fellowship.

The story didn’t change on Saturday. I had to wear a creased skirt and an unplanned T-shirt to town and back – so much unlike me.

But anyway, that was actually the least of my worries because these days most Ghanaians understand the fact that owning an iron doesn’t guarantee your consistent use of it.

Night fell, and power hadn’t been restored. I began to get worried. Liaising with my neighbour whom I had had discussions with the previous day, we packed our defrosted animal protein into polythene bags, labeled them and sent them for good keeping in the freezer of a friend who resides at Roman Ridge – a journey which lasted about 80 minutes (forty in, forty out).

When on Sunday, I had no means of telecommunicating with any of my contacts, I conceived a divine idea. I walked to the nearest lorry station (about 10 minutes from my residence), found one of the taxi drivers who is my friend, and gave him our phones – mine and Obodai’s. We added our chargers too.

I came to an agreement with the gentleman to charge our phones in turns using a special device he had on his dashboard. We tested it and it worked.

Time was two in the afternoon on Sunday when he took over our battery-dead phones. He was to make the phones charge fully whilst plying his routes. He promised to let us have them in the next three hours. To compensate his kind consideration, we gave him GH¢10.00 as charging fee.

At seven-thirty in the evening, we still hadn’t received our cellular phones, and there was no other means of communicating with this driver. We became apprehensive of the possibility of losing them to he whom we thought as trustworthy. Sunday ended, and there were no phones nor driver in sight.

At around 5:45a.m on Monday, we were getting ready for work when I heard a loud bang on our door. It was the taxi driver. He apologised frantically about his inability to get in touch with us when he was delaying in bringing our phones to us.

“Oh Madam, on my way back from my second trip, someone hired me to Kasoa. The deal I got was very good so I decided to finish that contract before coming. But I got locked up in traffic so I decided to go home rather than to travel all the way here”. He lives at Darkoman which is quite a distance from where I live.

As soon as I took over the phones, I heard the children of the squatters opposite our residence yell in joy, “yasɔr light ooo!






Source: graphic showbiz