I'm thoroughly at home in the modern world, having lived 1/3 of my life, so far, in the 21st century. Naturally, electricity is a major part of my modern life-style; even more so, I think, since having moved to a Third World country.
The province where I currently call home has more than it's share of electrical power outages (locally referred to as "brown-outs"). I live in a small town not far from the provincial capital, Dumaguete. You might say Sibulan is a suburb or bedroom community of Dumaguete.
There is an electric power station (fueled by geo-thermal sources) not far from Dumaguete, which make the frequent brown-outs all the more puzzling to me. I thought the nearby location of the power plant would make the grid more reliable in our area. I was wrong.
It may be my imagination, but it seems to me that the barangay where I live (Magatas, Sibulan) has more brown-outs than in the surrounding areas. Jose Rizal supposedly called Dumaguete "The City of Gentle People". To me, Magatas is the Barangay of Brown-outs.
I bring this up now because we just experienced a short brown-out. As I said, being a modern man, electricity - which provides me with Internet, TV, and lights, to name few things- is important to me.
I have, however, managed to do quite well during the times when TV or the Internet aren't available. I survive.
What does bother me is finding myself at the mercy of the Philippine heat without fans or air-con. An hour or so in the heat is miserable enough, but a twelve hour brown-out can be almost unbearable. Fortunately, we haven't had many all day maintenance brown-outs this year.
Some foreigners have gone so far as to buy emergency generators for the all day brown-outs. I haven't quite gotten to that point yet.
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