Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Rolling Blackouts, or Why I Sometimes Ditch You on Skype

This is the street just two blocks down from my building.  Mine has just as many criss-crossed, jumble-bundled power lines.  I thought this was normal until Mom told me it's not what power lines look like at home.  She told me they are like this here because whenever a new apartment is finished, a new line is simply added on to the old ones and tied or cut in wherever it can fit.  

I worried that this might be dangerous or cause some confusion, but she said not to fear.  There are many bamboo ladders available to fix said wires.  She pointed out the one below while we were walking today.
I realized the men I've seen climbing around on those are not just playing on a giant jungle gym, but actually working to correct electricity problems.  They like to just lean their ladders right on the wires they're trying to untangle.  Sounds fun to me!
Of course, sometimes there are electricity problems that these men can't fix, or that are actually power outages.  In order to understand my Bangladeshi life, you need to understand these power outages.

Fact number one: It's getting hotter here.  

Fact number two: The heat makes people use more electricity.  They need their air conditioners and fans a whole lot more in these dry summer and the coming monsoon months.  

Fact number three: Dhaka does not have enough electricity for all thirteen million people who live here.  

So, people in Dhaka are using more electricity than is available.  Power companies use planned rolling blackouts to avoid accidental blackouts for the whole city.  That means different parts of the city do not have electricity at different parts of the day.  Our building loses power about six times a day right now, for about an hour at a time.  Back in October, it was about twice that much.

Of course, foreigners and other people with money live in apartment buildings that have backup generators.  Our park even has a backup generator.  We're not sure what for.

You can usually tell how much money people have by what their generators run.  If you are rich, your generator runs everything in your house, even the air conditioning units.  If you are pretty rich, your generator might take a little longer to turn on, but still runs most things.  Our generator runs four fans and four lights in our house.  If you don't have money, you probably don't have a generator.  Just imagine all of the people trying to sleep on these 80 and 90 degree nights with not even the whisper of a fan in a building so close to the next one that there is no hope for a breeze.  
Now you know a little about two reasons our modem might stop working.  A line might have been tangled with some bouganvilla, or Dhaka might be saving energy for someone else.  Either way, I'm thankful for the fan in my room and the chance to have air conditioning part of the day.  Please pray for the people who don't have either!

2 comments:

  1. OK, we didn't have rolling blackouts in China so I can't commiserate with you about that. I'm jus sorry the world is like this.

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  2. We showed these pictures to Duane Buer, our electrician, yesterday. He thought they were pretty amazing and took them home to show his fellow electricians...

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