It's a really common thing here. By common I mean everyday. By midday it heats up to a balmy 93 degrees Fahrenheit and every A.C. in Dhaka is switched on. This is when the load shedding begins. Load shedding or a rolling black-out is an intentional shutdown of certain grids of power in order maintain power in other areas. Normally this occurs 3-6 times or so a day depending on the temperature and the mood the fiend that controls the lot is in. This morning some storms somehow managed to knock out power for an apparent 2-3 days. I'm not sure how this worked because I didn't see any damage but the man shouting into a microphone in a patrolling rickshaw through the streets of my neighborhood assured us that this indeed was the occurrence. Of course we were informed of this 14 hours into a non-stop outage. The power came on for short 15-30 minute intervals for a bit but not long enough to save the food spoiling in many people's refrigerators. Our generators can run 3 lights and 3 fans per apartment unless there are special circumstances in a couple apartments in which a plug can operate.
My problem solving mode kicked in. I wanted to save the remaining food in freezers before it was too late. My thinking was if we waited until morning most of the food will be Shesh which of course is bangla for finished (and in in rare cases dead:) I spent 2 hours making calls and sending texts going through different scenarios but not much can be done until morning. It was suggested we connect a refrigerator to a working wall plug. In an amazing set of adapters and multi-plugs we achieved the feat of connecting one fridge to the working socket some 30ish ft away. Hopefully all will go well and we won't burn down the lane 5 apartments. (I live on lane 8:) With the fridge successfully connected I made my way home to an oddly silent half of DOHS (my neighborhood). We have power! I don't know for how long but in the meantime my AC is on full blast in hopes I will be able to sleep if it goes to on an hour off an hour generator power. It will overheat if it runs more than an hour. It gets hot real quick without a working fan. Oddly quiet too. I hope it stays on tonight but we shall see!
