36 hour blackout

If ever I doubted I was living in a developing country, after 30 hours of without power and with its not to come on for another 6 hours and with nationals themselves cynically referring to PNG Power as PNG Powerless, my removing the lid of the cistern of the toilet to get about 6 or so jamtins full of water for a bath to cool me down after coming home from church was sufficient to make me aware. Without power there was no pump to get water otherwise. The knowing ones fill up reservoirs when a blackout happens but being relatively new my only reservoir that i could think of was the cistern. But even for the knowing ones 36 hours of blackout was a frustration - particularly when PNG Power did not advertise the problem if it was a scheduled interruption.
I had never thought of PNG as developing. As a neighbour to Australia I thought of it as much the same as what I had left at home - its not being a tourist destination like Bali or Fiji meant for me that it was much like Australia which explained (in my mind) why it wasn't a tourist destination. And living on campus at Uni which is comparatively sophisticated, I could be in Cairns or some other big country town oasis. But then another two blackouts this morning reinforced the idea of this being a developing country. For many too on account the kina has halved in value and with persistent problems of law and order and corruption, with monopolies like Telekom and Air Niu Guinea offering sub standard expensive service, with high tarriff rates, they worry that rather than being a developing country it is actually a regressing country.