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09/30/2003: "Kandahar Chronicles #19 - 29/09/2003"

Kandahar settles for the night, the new moon and the headlights of the traffic the only sources of illumination. For the last week there’s been no power, generators and kerosene lanterns have replaced the electricity once supplied by the Hydro electric dam in Helmand province. The romance of soft light echoing an earlier time has become an inconvenience to operations like ours that rely a lot on twenty first century technology to run smoothly. My timing is shit. Two days before the lights went out I’d sent our generator to Pakistan for a rebuild from the dealer and am still waiting for it to come back. I’ve rigged up the small generator we use for emergencies such as cholera outbreaks and it’s only strong enough to run our computers. Black smoke from unmonitored kero lamps stain the walls of our dining room and the whole city smells like a garage.

The story I have is that there are three turbines in the dam dating from the fifties. Over the last few months they’ve broken down and been desperately bodged together with spit and string or some such thing. Finally one went down and it was cannibalised for parts to keep the other two going. Power became inconsistent but manageable with our battery/inverter system. Then the second one seized or disintegrated or melted or whatever it did and then the rationing began. Power for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. Sometimes we would get lucky, have power during the 8-10 pm slot and catch a film on TV. Then one day…nothing. At least it is happening now when we are not relying on air coolers to keep from going homicidal, but with winter nipping the air at night already and the new turbines reportedly three months from being fitted, I’m glad to see our kerosene heaters stacked neatly in the stores.