This is the about the 5th time I've sat down to write this and the power has gone out. It goes out at the most inconvenient times it seems like. The power cuts in Dhaka have been so bad this year because we are having a gas crisis-there is not enough to go around, especially when people are running air-cons at full blast this time of year when it is hot and humid as hell. And it is only May....
School used to be a safe haven where I knew there would almost always be internet and air conditioning. When the power went out the generators would kick in a couple of seconds later providing us with the air conditioning us Americans have become so dependent on. Since the power cuts this Spring we have been overusing our generators, which have been breaking under all the added use. Now when the power goes out at school we don't have air con for up to several hours and/or lights and electric.
We pride ourselves on being a tech-savvy school and we have MAC lap tops and an outstanding tech department. However, we can't always rely on this technology with constant and extended power outages. Both in our classrooms and at homes-I can make a visually stimulating Keynote presentation or a Prezi but if the power goes out and the projector can't do its job it's no use. We can't exactly ask our kids to do a tech stuff at home either. A lot of the websites we use at school are inaccessible from home-we get special permissions and shields that allow us to access more web sites but a lot of them basically don't like that we're in Bangladesh or their networks don't extend that far. Therefore we can't ask students to go on these sites at home. If you assign homework that requires the internet you will undoubtedly get multiple excuses about internet not working, which more often than not are completely legitimate.
Back in the fall we didn't have internet for a few days because there was some problem with the cable that gave us internet. It ran under the Indian Ocean from India to Bangladesh. It took several days to repair it.
It is amazing the things that you get used to-if the power went out in a restaurant or school at home it would be a huge deal and would cause a big disturbance. Here, people don't even respond, they just keep right on doing whatever they were doing, just in the dark. If the internet was out for several days or even hours at home, people would act like the world had ended.
Think I'm headed for a heavy dose of reverse culture shock in about a month...