Electrician Helps the Poor

Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya — In a year as a "freelance" slum electrician, Francis Otieno has been shocked five times. Three of the accidents were "not so bad," just enough to throw him across the room. Two nearly killed him.

"I just cried out. I didn't know what was going on. I passed out," he says. "For two days, I didn't know where I was."

But he was luckier than his best friend, who had the job before him: He was killed when he jumped on a roof to fix a short, unaware that the roof was live because a rat had nibbled at a wire. If people here in the Kibera slum outside Nairobi, the capital, waited for the government to connect every mud hut and corrugated iron shack to electricity, they'd never have light.

It's DIY or do without.

Here's how it works: Otieno's boss gets electricity legally from Kenya's power authority, then sells it to Otieno and two others.

From there, it gets a little less legal. He supplies Otieno with wire to connect any of the 40 households in his patch.

Otieno collects a monthly payment of about $5 per house, skimming off a small commission and delivering the rest to his boss.

Otieno, 36, is a hero to his neighbors. Electrical problems are frequent. He gets calls from dawn until after dark. If he's sitting down to dinner, he abandons his plate and goes to investigate.

"I leave my dish of food and go to serve them first," he says.

But the dangers are many.

"Sometimes children or mothers died when they have a short," says Otieno, a father of three. "Sometimes people's houses burn down." He speaks slowly, searching for words, pausing frequently.

The main problem for a freelance electrician is rats. There are millions of the rodents in Kibera, creeping into people's shacks, chewing through electrical wires.

The other danger is the rainy season, which turns Kibera into a slippery, muddy swamp -- particularly "downtown," as the bottom of the hill where Otieno lives is known.

The water trickles through shack roofs as leaky as colanders, dripping into electrical wiring and sometimes shocking the person trying to fix the damage.

Out in the rain, struggling to fix wiring with wet shoes and sopping clothes, Otieno has had a couple of shocks that way.

Sometimes the problems are caused by people hanging clothing on the electrical wires to dry.http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/03/world/la-fg-slum-electrician3-2010jan03