At 90, Salome Nyambura’s eyesight is okay. However, if you ask her, she sees things differently. In distances beyond 50 metres, people appear like gangly silhouettes pirouetting in the horizon.
“I hurt my eyes the moment I learnt to read the Bible,” she tells me, quickly adding that she has a distant ache in her back. “I would sit next to an oil lamp and read into the night. I did not know then that the poor lighting affected my eyes. Soot, too, hurt me.”
Her tribulations are, fortunately, over. A tiny solar panel was the turning point, followed by other equipment which included a rather good-looking torch that can charge her phone as well. The torch is solar-powered.
This transition to the use of solar energy to power homes has been a revelation in many homes in the country.
Faith Muthoni, a first-year student at Chuka University, recalls the agonizing days when, as a primary school pupil, she struggled with a smoky oil lamp.
“When I was in Standard Five, I had an eye infection courtesy of the lamp,” she says. “I was constantly in hospital. My eyes really hurt.”
Her pupils went whitish, and the optician sounded a warning: she would have to wear spectacles. With prescription medicine that was administered often, however, her eyes gradually recovered. At the same time, her parents bought solar panels, powering the house in a new, harmless manner.
But Muthoni might never forget how, before the solar panels finally landed on the family home’s roof, she used to finish her homework in school, during the day, using natural lighting, as the lighting at home was insufficient and harmful. She was not always in every teacher’s good books.
And when Martha Wacuka sees an oil lamp, she remembers soot and regular trips to the shopping centre for paraffin. Often, something would go wrong. The lamp would flicker to death in the dead of the night, or the wick would decide to finally to roll up. Or there would be no money to buy paraffin.
“I always feared that I would be asked to clean the glass lamp. If it broke, that was second to insubordination,” she says.
The reprieve came in the form of solar power, which did more than just provide an efficient lighting system. Suddenly, a TV could be introduced and other electric gadgets could make their way into the house.
According to Power Africa Solar, almost 1.2 per cent of homes in Kenya are using solar energy, mainly for lighting and charging television sets. For many, the age of charging phones at shopping centres where power was available is gone.
Power Africa Solar, which offers Kenyans solar power solutions, also reports that Kenya has a solar energy capacity of 4 to 6 kiloWatt hour per square metre a day (kWh/m2/day). The …….