As Mevlüt Özil paused to light a cigarette before answering my final question, his office was plunged into darkness. Not only had the fluorescent light above his desk stopped flickering, but the street below us was now an inky abyss. The city of Isparta had gone black, silent, as the electrical grid shuddered and gave out. The former teacher turned NGO president laughed:

“Well, there you go, the power’s out again.”

This was a full two weeks after a historic snowstorm had blanketed this small Turkish city, collapsing roofs and coating electrical lines in ice and snow so thick they snapped. I was there to talk about the power outage that had been plaguing parts of the region for up to ten days, leaving residents without heat or water in the extreme winter. In the cold and dark of his office, Özil turned to me, shining a cell phone torch toward his face: “Seems they still haven’t fixed it,” he said.