The Switch

In the movie Daddy Day Care, Eddie Murphy is befuddled when one of the kids asks him, "Where to babies come from?" It's a question that we only know how to answer with the crudest of mechanics. Some parents might scramble to answer by saying something like, "We asked God for you and 9 months later, you arrived."
So imagine if a child asked you where the light in a light-bulb comes from: "Well, the electric company sends light... then we send them money." How far would most of us get in explaining the crude mechanics? Some people could piece together the basics of combustion, that magnets somehow assist in transforming that into electrical energy. However, the truth is that most of us don't pay any attention to it. Light comes from flipping the switch.
However, ask a kid in Ethiopia where electricity comes from, and they won't point to the light switch. They are likely to bring you around to their generator. There are still frequent power outages in Ethiopia, and with unreliable electric supply from "the grid", flipping the switch sometimes results in...nothing. As a result, many households and almost every business has a generator.
The training center here recently installed a large generator donated by Japan. One of the electro-mechanical engineers, Mulaku, made a new panel to switch from the grid to the generator when necessary, and the other day he showed me the well-crafted wooden box with two new switches inside. "This one is for the grid--you see, it's on now--and this one is for the generator."
The generator looks like a huge blue box, maybe 15 feet long, with the engine on one end and the transformer on the other. My experience with engines is limited to starting the lawn mower, so I asked Mulaku if he wouldn't give me a crash course on how it worked. He brought me over to the control panel and explained how to check the 3-phase circuit, which knobs to twist and levers to pull. Then he said, "this generator operates at 35% of capacity to supply 35,000 watts of power to the center. The previous generator was operating at 98% capacity, so over the years, it became damaged." He then further simplified the explanation by comparing it to a donkey, of all things. "If you make the donkey carry too much, it can't move. But give it a lighter load, and it will be able to travel far and work for many years. This donkey will too."
So much for horsepower. But I feel like I gained some insight into the real differences in infrastructure that make a country "developed". Ethiopia will probably need nuclear power in order to develop reliable, nationwide electric power, and anyone who reads the news knows there are complications to that. So people here will continue to flip the switches to their generators before flipping on the lights. Although, considering the fertility rate here is one of the highest in Africa (at 5.29), maybe they don't mind foregoing the lights some evenings.