Loadshedding

“Put the kettle on”, “I might take a shower”, “I need to charge my phone”. When these thoughts pop in your head you can just do it, right? Well it depends on where you live in the world, and for the last nine years of our life we haven’t been able to do these things whenever we want because of Loadshedding.

Load shedding is the name given here for the rolling power cuts that we have endured throughout our time in Nepal. We’ve blogged about it before. The city is divided into groups and each group has two scheduled power cuts a day. The daily total cuts can range from 2-12 hours depending on the time of year and how little rain there has been.

That is all until November when suddenly the scheduled power cuts stopped without warning. Initially nobody seemed to know why, although we weren’t complaining.

Anyhow, it turned out that there was a new head to the Nepal Electricity Authority, and having looked at everything, he decided that we didn’t need the power cuts, but that with some efficiency saving plans, mostly involving cutting out corruption, there was enough power for the city. You can read more about it by clicking here.

So now we are enjoying 24/7 power (apart from the odd unscheduled and usually short outage), amazing how quickly you get used to something good. We’re trying not to take it for granted though, especially when we think back to the blockade and all the shortages last year. Life is anything but predictable!