I was lucky to spend time with quite a few of my friends this past week. It was a lunch here, a phone call there, a filled table at a bar, a laughter shared.

Just like many others, I feel friendship is what makes a difference in life. What is special about me is maybe I have so many friends. I am not saying it to brag, it’s just who I am. Maybe it is even a sort of problem as this leads to often feeling like time is just not enough to regularly see all the people I want to keep close. I think it is one of the reasons I love social media so much, it allows me to keep up with my big pool of friends.

And make new ones, of course! I have a very low threshold from bumping into someone to “take them as my friend” as we say here in Ghana. I have meaningful encounters with others in queues, on Twitter, at events – I even feel cheated if someone choose to sleep next to me on a plane!

I am passionate about my friends. I pride myself they are all very different (although many of them seem to be “storytellers” or talkatives, I have noticed, although talkative myself, with them I am the awed audience!), well in outer descriptives: age, sex, background, class and so forth. They give me useful perspectives, they make me smile, they give me energy and I love to think about them and plan the next time we meet.

I realise, it is not often I tell my friends how much they mean to me,  but this weekend, my friend Kofi found an excellent way of describing it:

“If you surround yourself with the right people, then life is Gold. Gold!”

I dedicate this post to my friend Anna who has made my life gold many times.

Currently, load shedding in Ghana due to short supply of electricity is seriously straining the country: house holds now have full power only 1 day out of 3 and since last week, industries are also affected.

This means life in Ghana is now either very uncomfortable or very expensive. Where I live, one day the power goes off all day 6am-6pm, next day all evening 6pm-midnight or later. Only on the third day we have power. We are fortunate to have a generator, but it is old and consumes much diesel so we try to not use it more than a few hours at a time.

This is of course affecting productivity. No power during the day means no washing of clothes, no emails, no power for the fridge which means no shopping on those days.

No power during the night means tossing and turning in the heat and not getting a good night’s sleep for the next day ahead.

Especially serious is it that industries now also have to share power. This will likely lead to lay-offs and reduced production, investors might look elsewhere and improvements cannot be done as basic terms of business no longer apply.

Then seeing this TV-ad from the election 2012 where the ruling party NDC makes promises to extend electricity to more households and create a steady supply for lie to improve is simply just painful.