People ther are not used to these temperatures and often don't know how to protect themselves (and their houses) from the heat.

It takes a while to figure out how aggressive you must be. Our rules are:

In the evening, after about 7:00 pm, open all the windows and all the doors, and run a fan that circulates air through the house. Also we have overhead fans that circulate the cooler evening air up against the ceilings, to try to cool the attic. Ideally, we would have an attic vent fan.

At night, keep working to get the house as cool as possible, even if you have to sleep under a light blanket. Keep the fans running all night long; the goal is to get everything in the house as cool as possible. The heat capacity of the furniture and walls is a lot higher than the air, so even if the air is cool, it takes quite a while to get the heat out of the solid objects.

With our cool summer nights here in Colorado, we can usually get the interior temperature down to around 20 C most nights.

In the morning, no later than 7:00 am, close up all of the windows and doors. It will seem pleasant in the morning, and you will feel foolish wandering around in you housecoat, and you will want to let in the fresh morning air, but the goal is to keep the inside of the house as cold as possible. You need to go about this with a religious fervor, regardless of how tempting it is to open the windows on a nice summer morning.

Using this method we have--until this summer, at least--managed to keep our interior temperature below about 27 degrees without the use of A/C even on the hottest days, when the outside temperature in the afternoon exceeds 35 C. This summer was bad for a number of reasons, partly because of the unusual heat, but mainly having to do with house guests who lack sufficient religious fervor.