I am spending a few days in rural Nakuru. I have made a lot of observations especially on how people make their money.
They do not use a lot of soft skills. While an average Nairobian Gen Z is working in an air conditioned office at Kilimani, Central Business District or upper hill, the youths and adults in Kiambogo area of Gilgil Constituency are hard at work eking a living by working on farms, fetching water from boreholes using bicycles and motorcycles, washing cars, welding, buying and stockpiling cereals for resell later when prices are good.
As a man who has lived in the city for over 15 years but now patronizing the rural village as a temporary resident, I wanted to send an urgent email but as I write this article I am yet to find a cyber cafe where I can work on some spreadsheets.
The few cybers open at Kongasis have one laptop or desktop and those are not for customers use to browse or type. They are used by the owners of the cyber cafe. Your work as a customer is to say what you want to be done and it will be done for you.
Therefore, if you have a spreadsheet that might be beyond the comprehension of the cyber cafe man or woman, then you have to trying finding the services elsewhere. That is what it is. If you don’t like the situation of cyber cafes, then you have to drive or be driven in densely packed Toyota Proboxes to Pipeline or Nakuru just to access a computer in order to complete your excel spreadsheet.
It seems to me that the best solution is to have your own high speed laptop and a source of power if you are living off-grid like me. In terms of power I am sorted with some 100 Watts solar module, a charge controller, 2400 Watt hours battery for storage and 600 Watts inverter for producing Alternating Current or AC.
The day before yesterday, my Inverter blew up in apart and shut off. I thought that is the end of the road for an upcoming writer operating off grid. I asked a few friends of mine if my Inverter can be repaired at the local center, they expressed pessimissim and told me that inverters are never repaired. On Dan told me that I throw it away and buy a new one. That nearly broke my heart.
Despite the negative feedback I received, I decided to go ahead and seek the opinion of a local business man who sales solar power equipment. A quick diagnosis revealed that I needed to change the fusing which had blown up doe to power upsurge. That is it. Now my inverter is working optimally and I wish it a long and fruitful life generating AC power for my devices.
These are the challenges that my fellow villagers face in their day-to-day life. Some of them do not even bother to acquire a big solar system. All they need is to have their phones charged and a small light for use at night and that is it.
However, for a Nairobian who does not want to leave behind his culture of modern communication and posting on social media to educate, entertain and influence, I have to be well equipped in this off-grid lifestyle.
I love the fact that most of the off-grid homes do not incur expenses such as rent, no power bills, no water bills but they buy water from boreholes. Their biggest headache is accessing water for domestic and livestock consumption.
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