I had just finished feeding the family when the power went out. Emergency lighting came on in the apartments stairwells and hallway and every one on the floor seemed to not be surprised. Windows were opened there was some mild chatter and everyone settled down for the evening. It was just before 9 and it looked like bedtime would be at a forced hour tonight. There was no storm outside and to me it seemed a bit strange. Out the windows I could see everything within a couple of blocks all around us was lit up, but here there was darkness. It was dark outside, the air had been on so it was still comfortable and I laid down and immediately fell asleep.
I awoke at 2 a.m. to a soaked shirt and a hellishly hot apartment. I opened the bathroom door to try to get a breeze blowing through, remember my bathroom is open to the elements, and prepared to take a shower. There was obviously no functioning water heater in the absence of electricity, but I did not want hot water anyway. The lord prepares a path came to mind as I turned the shower nozzle and wonderfully cold water came streaming out. It was an act of God that it had been heavily overcast and had rained off and on all day. The lack of sun and the cool rain cooled off the steel tanks on the roof and I was finally able to have water so deliciously cooling and refreshing. Like a scene from leaving Las Vegas I leaned with my head against the wall and let the cool water pull the heat from my body.
After drying off I went back to the bed to discover that Diệm, used to both heat and hard surfaces, was sound asleep on the marble floor no doubt using the cool tile to regulate her body temperature. Something I was not conditioned for, it often surprised me how people in Vietnam will often seek the hardest surfaces to sleep on. The sleeper cars on the overnight trains here even offer a hard berth or a soft berth. A hard berth is literally the metal of the pull down bed frame with maybe a quarter inch hard styrofoam pad just so you have something to put a sheet on.
I laid back down and was immediately sweating again from the stagnant heat in the apartment. I pulled up the Vietnamese power companies website to see if I could get any information about timetables or accidents reported and what I found was shocking. We were in a cúp điễn or a forced outage. The rapid growth in Vietnam coupled with its increasingly popular tourist status has left her in a situation were an already overly taxed and archaic system is being pushed to the edge of collapse. As recently as 2013 there was a massive outage caused by substandard infrastructure which affected some 8 million inhabitants and causing a domino effect even leaving the capital of Cambodia in the dark for 8 hours.
As a result of trying to mitigate unforeseen blackouts and brownouts the government issues mandatory rolling power cuts to wards in the cities and even whole towns in the countryside. The governments stance is its better to prepare your property like food and security in an expected and managed manner than at the whims of human consumption. Our ward I found however, not to be on the list. If we weren’t scheduled for a black out then why were we in one. There is also another part to this story. In addition to scheduled blackouts there is also an electrical version of throttling going on as well. If a ward consumes to much power for an extended period of time it trips a virtual ward “breaker” and your out of power until it comes back on. Seeing that I’m probably the only one in the ward that has run his air conditioning non stop since arriving I couldn’t help but feel partly responsible.
I took several more cold showers as I paced the sweltering apartment unable to return to sleep in the growing heat. I wrote some, paced some, laid down some. Nothing seem to encourage sleep and almost immediately after shutting the water off in the shower I would become uncomfortably hot again. I was beginning to think about sleeping in the shower with some cool spray when the light of the lamp lit through my eyelids and the whir of the air conditioner kicked back on. It was 6:30 a.m. and I got up to shut the windows and bathroom door and laid back down. Within minutes the room was cool again and I fell asleep, at least for a little while. The apartment came alive quickly as the family started coming in and out. Today was a special day, a special day indeed and sleep was not on the itinerary.
