Sweating through the Dark

I was lying in bed in the middle of the night, tossing and turning, unable to settle into a single comfortable position. Do I lie on my right side or my left? I couldn't stand the claustrophobic sensation of another pillow touching my body. Eventually, I settled on my back. I could immediately feel the heat rising, the sweat pooling between my skin and the bedsheets—but it was a fraction more tolerable than the alternatives.

Usually, around this hour, I would still be awake by choice, finishing up paperwork under the glow of my laptop. But tonight, choice had been stripped away. There was nothing left to do but stare into the dark; the power had been out for hours. I kept watching the ceiling, waiting for the lights to flicker back to life, hopelessly wishing for a relief that wasn't coming.

I live within the coverage area of the Calabanga power substation, which suffered a major failure yesterday. As I write this, the lines are still completely dead. We are only a few hours away from hitting the 24-hour mark of this total blackout, and I can't help but wonder if it will stretch even longer.

I heard that lightning struck the substation during a heavy downpour, and honestly, that makes scientific sense. Lightning is a naturally occurring, high-voltage electrostatic discharge. It seeks the highest point, which is likely why it targeted a CASURECO pole. I know it’s not the electric cooperative’s fault. It’s no one’s fault; it's just nature.

But what makes this pill so bitter to swallow is the timing. Just a day before this—a Sunday—we had already endured a scheduled 12-hour power suspension mandated by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP). We were given just a single day of reprieve before being plunged right back into another agonizing outage. And it had to happen during the peak of an El Niño summer. Even when the fan blades were spinning, the humidity was thick and suffocating; without electricity, the air feels downright incendiary.

These half-day "power droughts" happen once or twice a month. I struggle to understand the necessity of it all, but like most people here, I suppose I had come to terms with it. We’ve been conditioned to get used to it. We just wait it out, expecting the power to return late in the afternoon. But after surviving a day of that torrid heat, coming home to a sequel of the exact same horror movie through the night is exhausting. Still, I kept trying to think positively. Maybe the electricity will snap back on right now. Maybe the lights will suddenly blind the room, and the collective cheers and screams of relief from the neighborhood will echo through the dark. I waited. I waited and waited, sweating through the night and straight into the morning.

I understand the technicalities. I know NGCP mandates lengthy interruptions for major substation upgrades, transmission asset relocation, or critical preventive maintenance. But can’t we do better than this?

I often hear stories from American expats who talk about how they’ve grown to love the Philippines—the hospitality, the food, the beaches. But in the same breath, they talk about how they’ve gotten accustomed to the heavy traffic, the bureaucracy, and the brownouts. They discuss our power failures as if they are a colorful quirk of Filipino culture. (We desperately need to fix the traffic and bureaucracy too, but that’s an article for another day).

This should not be our normal.

Intermittent brownouts riddling a single day should not be normal. A whole day of a flatlined grid from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM should not be normal. Yes, Filipinos are famously resilient. We take the blows with a smile. We will scrape together some halo-halo under a mango tree, go for a swim, or kill time at an air-conditioned mall to cope. But authorities should not use our resilience as an excuse to let the system stagnate.

We have been told repeatedly that our national power supply is thinning. If that is the case, where are the long-term solutions? It is easy to point to other nations in Africa, South Asia, or the Caribbean and claim that the Philippines actually has it better. But shouldn't our goal be to make our "better" even better?

We are capable of doing better than this. But until the visionaries and authorities finally lay down a concrete roadmap to fix our grid, I have no choice but to head out, buy gas for our generator, and let it rumble on.

Galatians 6:9: "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." We won't give up on demanding the progress we deserve.