Winter has finally hit! About two weeks ago we got some snow across the whole country, and it has caused problems for lots of people. It’s nothing like what hit the US this year, but for a place like this - with no way to deal with it - things really stop. And nobody minds much. (Side note: believe it or not, everyone in Azerbaijan is talking about how Washington DC is buried in snow! And I don’t mean the Peace Corps workers – it’s the locals, and it's on the Baku news here every night.)
My office, just three blocks away, was closed all of last week and all of this week. The folks I work with live a few hours away and can’t get here, and without them there’s nothing to do. So the office is closed. Plus, because they’re not here they didn’t pay their satellite bill, so there’s no phone or Internet.
(Update - a couple of guys I work with showed up and paid the satellite bill around the 17th, so I'm posting this blog entry from the office on the 19th.)
That’s great for me – this has given me the time to catch up on lots and lots of things that have been nagging at me since December. Last week I finished a couple of books, did some shopping, fixed a broken CD player, recharged my AA and AAA batteries, fixed a couple more things, got some much-needed exercise, did my laundry, and met with my Peace Corps boss – all very productive. I’m one of the few PCVs that has been busy with "real" work ever since I arrived and really needed the free time to get my personal act together.
This week I’m going to spend my time getting to know Samaxi better. One of the other PCVs who lives here, Emma, is going to hike around the town with me so week can find out more about the businesses they have here and learn about the area. She’s been here for over a year already, so she has the language skills and knows her way around the town well. I can learn a lot from her. Things are changing in Samaxi and we’re going to find out all we can about it. Tourism looks like it’s coming, so we’re going to do some research. We’re both looking for side projects to help the community, plus I'm looking for projects to work on in case AzRIP moves - in November they told me they might move up north in a year. If I want to stay here, I'll need to find something to do (i.e. find a job, just in case).
First… this will surprise you....it sure surprised me! After our snow two weeks ago, the main roads in Şamaxı were plowed! And gravel was put down for traction! Incredible!! Then it snowed again a couple of days ago, and they did it again!! Thanks to the plowing, the roads were clear the next day. We’re not talking about real snow plows like you see in Chicago and NY, but more like what you see in Raleigh – pickup trucks or dump trucks with plows bolted onto the front. It works.
Not many towns in Azerbaijan are so lucky. In fact, I don’t know of a single one. According to the news, some roads not far from here have collapsed and slid down into the mountains, making travel impossible. That's why my colleagues from Barda can’t get here. In fact, another PCV is coming to visit me next week, and the roads are out are between my rayon and hers, so she might not make it.
Okay – back to tourism in Şamaxı. In summer, tourism by folks from Baku is pretty big here. Baku is hot and humid in summer and all of that combined with its lousy air (the worst on the planet) makes it unendurable. Kind of like Raleigh when the air quality is at its worst and they tell people to stay inside with the AC on, multiplied by 1000. People tell me it's like that all summer in Baku. People who can afford to come to Şamaxı come here as often as they can, so there are many second homes here. I hear lots of rich kids live here all summer, so moms probably do, too.
I also hear that Şamaxı summers have perfect temperatures and clean, fresh air. There are places in the mountains that are more beautiful than this, but this is a lot closer to Baku than they are. And it might be cooler - we're on a plateau, so the town sits at a higher altitude than the mountain towns with more to do, like Şeki. Maybe history brings people here, too.
There’s an old, totally run-down hotel in Şamaxı that they started refurbishing two weeks ago. They didn’t stop working while it snowed, so somebody is darned serious about getting it done. Plus, there are some brand new trolley cars sitting in one area downtown, and city maintenance seems to be better these days – like snow plowing and garbage pickup (which isn’t great, but better than most of the country). And there’s a “Ministry of Tourism and Culture” building that isn’t used, but is kept in very good shape. So we’re going to go have a look at all of this during our walk, plus find anything else we can find about the economic future of Şamaxı.
Some of us have wondered if anyone has considered snow skiing in Azerbaijan. I don’t think there is any, and it sure would take some serious money to get it started, but getting more people with money over this way through tourism might make someone think about it.
Also, as far as I know, all of the tourism in this town comes from Baku; that’s where most of the money is. But if they could bring it down from Russia they could bring in a whole lot more. A lot of us have talked about how Azerbaijan wants to be part of the EU some day, and to do that they definitely need another big source of income (besides oil, which they'll run out of soon) and lots of small and medium ones, too. Tourism could work.
Şamaxı was once the USSR’s biggest source of good wine. There were vineyards everywhere until Gorbachev got frustrated with the severe alcoholism of the Soviets and turned all the wineries into grape juice factories. As you can probably guess, those went under. That was 20 years ago and most of the people who know how to handle vineyards are gone, but a few are still here. So that’s another direction they could take.
There are lots of college students here, too. I haven’t found all the schools, but I know they’re pretty small. Şamaxı is also known for its historic artists – especially writers – so developing the schools could be another direction.
In other words, there’s a lot of potential here. It might not work until the standard practices of bribery and corruption are cleaned up, but I really think that will happen some day. It has to if they want to be a part of the EU. And it will be interesting to watch from the US in the future.
With all their oil, I wonder why they turn off our gas so often. For the last few days my bedroom has been so cold I can see my breath because the city turns off the gas all day on weekdays and all night every night. On weekdays it’s on from about 8 to 10am, then again from about 6 to 9pm. That doesn’t matter when I’m in the office all day – their gas isn’t usually cut off – but for folks who are home all day it can get pretty uncomfortable. At home we have gas for heat for only, what, about 5 hours a day? And sometimes none at all. Yesterday the pressure was so low the living room never heated up before it was shut off again. I slept in two long-sleeved t-shirts, a sweatshirt, heavy-duty long underwear, heavy slacks, ultra-heavy socks, heavy socks over my ultra-heavy socks, gloves, a skiing hat, and a scarf. Under a -20 sleeping bag. I wasn’t cold, but wearing all that stuff to bed means I have to do laundry a lot more often than I want to. So I just keep reminding myself that spring is in six weeks. Spring arrives with some kind of fantastic cultural celebration called Novruz, plus more days off from work to relax and catch up on things again. If it stays this cold I might break down and buy an electric heater – usually when the gas is out, the electricity is on. But not always.
And I gotta tell you that going outside to the hole-in-the-ground-tualet in below zero temps at 1:00am is an unforgettable experience. Everyone should spend a winter living like this. People have been doing it for how long? Hundreds of thousands of years? Hey, if they can do it (and if I can do it) so can you. It’s 9pm and below freezing now - I have to go and will let you know what it was like… but first I need to go put on my hat, down vest, scarf, and extra socks, then stuff some TP into my pocket…. (shoes are never, ever worn indoors, so they aren't put on until I'm outside)…
… Well, now that wasn’t so bad. The ground was icy and slippery between the steps and the tualet and it is very, very cold outside, but it was quick and easy. When I came back in I had to stop at the stove to restore feeling to my feet, but when I did that I watched the weather and it says it’s supposed to be 8C around here tomorrow, which will melt all this stuff. (For you non-metric folks, that’s the low 40’s.)
Suddenly I’m hungry again. I get hungry a lot these days, so keeping my body warm must use a heck of a lot of energy. I looked it up on the Web a few days ago, and it said something about 200 Kcal for every 10 degrees lower the outside temp is. But it didn’t say how much time that covers, so I don’t have any idea what it really takes. (If you know, let me know!) All I know is that my body talks to me by craving food - any kind of food - all the time. It’s making me go through apples, oranges, walnuts, and protein bars quicker than ever these days.
(…about a week later…)
Now spring has hit! It’s the second week the office has been closed and the weather has been like April. In the 50s, lots of rain, some sunshine. And I picked the right day to do my laundry – the only day it was sunny and windy enough for everything to be washed and dried on the same day. That’s an Azerbaijan first for me!!
I did over three weeks worth of laundry, which is a heck of a lot of clothing when you wear three layers all day and all night every day for two of those weeks.
A few weeks ago, Basira bought me an “automatic washing machine.” That’s what she calls it, anyway. And that’s what she told my Peace Corps manager she got for me (my response when he told me that was “well, sort of”). I took pictures of it while I was taking a break from doing my laundry, but accidentally deleted them. I'll take more and put them up on the blog some other time.
What that “automatic washer” is, is an upright metal tub that holds three buckets of water. The tub has an electric fan in the back of it that swishes the water around in circles that are parallel to its back wall (like a built-in wall fan), but most of the clothes movement and scrubbing comes from me and my arms. Above the tub is a set of power roller wringers – like on the old washing machines. I was really, really anxious to use those because my arms aren’t strong enough to wring out three weeks worth of winter clothing, but alas, the wringer rollers on the automatic washing machine don’t work.
Doing my laundry with this automatic washer was a better workout than I’ve ever had at any gym. It entailed reeling up more than 12 buckets of water from the well – each bucket alone a serious effort. Two buckets of water were heated on the stove upstairs, which entails lugging both buckets of water upstairs, heating it for an hour, then lugging it back down again to the yard outside and dumping it into the "automatic washing machine."
All of the washing is done outside because there is no place indoors to drain the water. Emptying the water out of the tub after a wash or a rinse means unscrewing the plug from a hole in the bottom of the tub and letting it pour out. That's easy.
There were four loads of laundry and I used the same water for all of them, losing and adding about one bucket of water with each load, so I needed to refill the tub each time I put in more clothing. During this process, I have two metal buckets to work with, so I’m going back and forth between the well and the washing machine the entire time. The workout actually feels good.
So washing my clothes in the "automatic washing machine" isn't very automatic. The fan helps, but only when the tub has just a few pieces of clothing in it. It is a lot better than the hand washing I’d done at Basira’s before because I didn’t have to squat over a tub on the ground to wash and rinse. Being almost upright is a heck of a lot more comfortable when washing for a couple of hours.
Then, when a piece of clothing looked clean enough to come out, I’d wring out the water and throw it in an empty plastic tub on the ground where it waited to be rinsed. Once all of the clothes were done, I’d repeat the process using “clean” (water right out of the ground full of all sorts of creepy crawly crud) rinse water, and when I pulled each piece from that, I’d wring it and hang it on the clothes line. My arms feel stronger than they’ve ever felt in my life.
This whole laundry process might sound awful, but I really felt great when it was done – from the exercise and the sense of accomplishment. And because I was lucky enough to have the one warm, sunny, and windy day in weeks, all of my clothing was dry by 5pm (I started at 10am, washed everything and hung it on the line by noon, and all of it was dry by 5). That night it poured rain outside, and all of my clothing was clean, dry, folded and put away. Unlike last time, when my clothing was rained on for nearly a week, then frozen and melted again before I brought it in and dried it by the stove.
The only thing that has me wondering is the cleanliness of the water. This stuff I reel up from the ground is nothing like the spring water you buy in bottles at the grocery store. This is water straight out of the ground underneath a town that’s been lived in for 2000 years. I don’t know what’s in it, but it sure ain’t clean. I can see lots stuff – moss, sticks, pieces of leaves, squiggly stuff, etc. And I know what's really in ground water from looking into a microscope during many college biology and botany classes. It’s absolutely loaded with multi-colored stuff spinning, swimming. hopping, twirling, multiplying… you name it. But my clothes smell good and look clean and I haven’t broken out in any rashes, so maybe it’s not too bad.
I’ve also been bathing in that water lately. The four college guys who live downstairs were gone for semester break for three weeks, so I got to see and use this house’s hemam (bathroom). And, wow! It’s a classic! It is the one room that does have a drain to the outdoors, and it’s only for bucket baths. But even if it were for laundry, I'd rather do my laundry outside where I'm closer to the chickens, the well, and the clothes lines.
The hemam here is a lot like the one in the house in Corat that I lived in from Oct to Dec, except it's bigger, has more light, is better heated, and has no stone bench. And its plumbing doesn’t work. It’s a room that's about 6ft x 10ft, made of stone and has a tile floor. It’s pretty filthy – strong spider webs in every corner and who-knows-what growing on that aged tile. But it also has a gas stove in it to keep me warm, which is very nice. And I could see that the tile floor was once beautiful. It has a big old water heater lying sideways on the floor, and pieces for a faucet and pipes sitting in the window sill and in a corner, so somebody intended to hook it up one day. But it looks like that was a long time ago.
The tools I use to take my bath with are an enormous metal bucket sitting about two feet off the ground. It's on an oven rack that's on top of a small, rusty, upside-down barrel. It holds three buckets of water, and when my bucket bath starts, it's full of heated well water that’s a mixture of super-hot water that was heated on the stove upstairs and cold water right out of the ground. On the floor next to the huge bucket are the two regular buckets (like metal ones you'd see on a farm) I used to do my laundry. One is full of heated water from upstairs and the other has cold water from the ground – those are used to adjust the temperature and for additional water. I use all of it. In the huge, metal bucket is a plastic sauce pan that I use to dump water on myself. That’s the setup. Plus, of course, my soap, shampoo, etc., sitting on the oven rack beside the huge bucket. When the room is warm enough (which it usually is), a bucket bath is really easy to get used to.
I’ve been using the hemam for the last few weeks, and for the first time since I was a kid my hair doesn’t need conditioner. I don’t like to think about what’s making my hair feel so good; I’ll just enjoy it. And my scalp recently stopped itching. It’s been itching ever since I arrived in Azerbaijan, but the hemam has ended that.
I’m about to have another hemam bucket bath in about an hour, and it’ll probably be my last one until the students go away on break again. They returned from semester break yesterday, but they'll be out during lunch today so I plan to sneak in to use it again with Basira standing guard. Usually Basira and I are at the office when the students are at school or on vacation, and we can’t do the bucket baths at home on office days (we can’t get away long enough - it takes a couple of hours with all the water hauling and heating), so it’ll probably be a long time before I can get into the home hemam again. But I’ll have something to look forward to.
I can’t use the hemam when the male students are here because it’s in their section of Basira's house and apparently they can’t handle having a naked woman in their midst. It’s not like they see anything; it’s just that the image is too much for them. A couple of weeks ago two of them came home when I was in the hemam and one of them was so totally embarrassed by my coming out of there (I was fully dressed!) he couldn’t look at me. But that gets into another huge, complicated topic that I’m still trying to understand and will write about some other time.
Now need to prep for my hemam – gather up the towels, clean clothes, soaps, and any other stuff I’ll need.
Ask me questions! I always have a lot to talk about, but don’t always know where to start. And I don’t know how boring all of this might be to folks who are buried in megatons of snow, sitting in front of their televisions watching the Olympics…. oh, and thank you to all of you who told me about the Azerbaijan team’s flashy clothing at the opening ceremony. I didn’t see the ceremony, but another PCV put a photo of the team in Facebook for all to look at. Those were very cute outfits they were wearing, but not anything like what they wear here. The only clothing color they truly wear is black.
Oh, and we do get the Olympics on the local TV here, but all I’ve seen so far is a minute or two of tennis in late afternoon (very early morning, US time). Watching tennis doesn’t hold my attention for more than a minute or two, so maybe I'll watch more when they get into ice skating, gymnastics, or skiing at 2am in Vancouver….
Hope you had a good Valentine's Day!
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