Sisters doing it for themselves: DRC nun fed up with power outages builds own hydroelectric plant [Video]

Sister Alphonsine Ciza spends most of her day in gumboots, white veil tucked under a builder’s hat, manning the micro hydroelectric plant she built to overcome daily electricity cuts in her town of Miti in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

She works around the clock with a team of nuns and engineers, greasing machinery and checking the dials of a generator that is fed from a nearby reservoir.

The mini plant lights up a convent, church, two schools and a clinic free of charge.

Without the plant, residents would only have electricity two or three days a week for a few hours.

“This is the alternator that produces the current and here we have the cabinet that sends the current to the population. It’s here that we make adjustments, it’s called the electrical cabinet,” said Ciza, 55, a portable voltage meter slung around her neck in the town of 300,000 …