Lesson no 3

 

Load shedding

 

Load shedding is one of many words that I had never heard before I came to South Africa. But after living here for almost ten months now I had more than enough chances to experience it myself!

As electricity in South Africa is always scarce, from time to time it may happen that it doesn’t suffice to meet the country’s demand. In these cases the electricity supply in certain changing areas is interrupted to avoid a national black-out that would have much worse consequences. And that’s called load shedding. Unfortunately load shedding often occurs in the evening hours when it’s not only dark and cold, but also when people want to cook. But as South Africans are very creative there are already lots of load shedding recipes available on the internet!

There also is scheduled load shedding that’s announced in advance. In summer people said there would be a lot of load shedding now to save electricity for the winter, but actually I feel like the load shedding got more and more since I came here and gets even worse now that it is winter. For me that’s not even such a big problem, because as I live at work and I’ve got the big luxury that we have an emergency generator. But normal households don’t and even many facilities where you would expect it don’t. So it regularly happens to me that I arrive at the gym motivated to hit the treadmill and suddenly it just stops moving under my feet. But that’s a comparably small problem. I have much more pity with all those people that are sitting in their cold and dark houses without any electricity and even the batteries of cell phones and laptops are slowly dying – and that sometimes several days a week!