by Heather Carreiro

Created on: July 04, 2008   Last Updated: July 08, 2008

With the average daily high in June at 103 degrees Fahrenheit, staying cool during power outages takes some creativity. Living in Lahore, Pakistan since January 2006 has allowed me to experience and learn to cope with the country's dramatically increasing energy crisis firsthand.

Upon my arrival in the winter of 2006, there was hardly any load shedding, government controlled power cuts, at all. A friend with advised me to purchase emergency lights that would turn on automatically when the power was cut. As the power almost never went out, I didn't see any pressing need to follow her advice. As the heat rose in March and April I got my first taste of load shedding. On average there was only 1-2 hours of load shedding a day in the Defence area, an upscale residential area, of Lahore.

When I moved outside of Defence into Gulberg I was in for another another taste of life in Pakistan. Load shedding was more frequent outside of Defence. In Defence it was limited to thirty-minute blocks. In Gulberg it would go several times during a 24 hour period, and more than once we were without electricity for several hours at a time. It was then that I learned the art of semi-sleeping through power outages.

When there's no electricity, it doesn't just mean the lights are out. More imposing is the heat and humidity that starts to envelop you within minutes of the power cut. In order to catch a few fragmented hours of sleep I would jump into the cold shower with all my clothes on. Then I would lay in bed and sleep until the heat had sucked all the cool moisture from my body and woke me up drenched in sweat again. Then I'd repeat the cycle. During the summer of 2006 there were only a few instances I can remember where the electricity was out for the entire night.

As summer ended and temperatures decreased, load shedding became less common and things went back to normal.' I still had not purchased any emergency lights.

My winter and spring of 2007 were spent back in the US, and my husband and I were welcomed back to Lahore in July by 110-degree heat. We moved into an upper portion in Defence where load shedding happened two or three times a day in thirty minute intervals. Electricity was rarely off for more than thirty minutes in the area where we lived. This pattern of load shedding did not seem to follow any particular schedule but was bearable.

Dramatic changes hit as winter moved into spring of 2008. Suddenly we had load-shedding periods of one-hour long 6-8 hours a day in the Defence

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>