Novruz Eve

In the first quarter of 2010 I have had six weeks off from work. I've worked during most of that vacation time, but most people don't. The Azeri people might not get a lot done with this much vacation, but sure does look like a pretty nice way to live life.

Novruz is the big holiday of the year. It’s the one everyone is waiting for. Endless food, gifts, relaxation, fireworks, and even kids at the door looking for candy and treats. Novruz means “new day” in Persian (that’s the same as Iranian, but they say "Persian" to be politically correct and to avoid offending Westerners). The Azeri language is really Turkish, but all Islamic languages seem to have a lot of Persian in them. Some words here are the same as ones I learned in Malaysia and Indonesia a long, long time ago, like sabah (tomorrow) and the days of the week. Although Iran is not a favorite nationality of most Americans, their history and culture are always fascinating.

Novruz is a holiday that’s over 3000 years old. It celebrates Spring and the Equinox, signifying a New Year. They also celebrate the New Year in January, but this is a different thing and a much bigger deal.

Celebrations start four weeks before the equinox, and every Tuesday night leading up to the equinox there's a heck of a lot going on. Bonfires, huge dinners, gift-giving, firecrackers and stuff like that. In some places, on the Tuesday night just before the equinox, the festival is even bigger than it is on the equinox. I didn’t see much of that - the area it's really practiced in is about 50 or 60 miles from me. That probably doesn't sound far, but it takes about three hours to get there from here, down muddy, windy, foggy mountain roads covered with horrible drivers. And on the holiday I’m sure some of them are drunk. I already spent many hours going to villages and to Baku this week, and that's enough of those roads for me for awhile.

Also, the temperature dropped on Wednesday night and the supersonic winds blew down through the Caucasus, bringing back winter weather just in time for spring. Wednesday night was very cold – my clean, wet clothing was frozen solid outside on the line. I washed them Saturday March 13 and it rained all week, so they were still soaking wet and turned to ice. Yesterday and today, March 19-20, it was sunnier so I took them down because I desperately needed clothes. They were still a bit wet, but dry enough that putting them under the gas stove finished the job in an hour or two.

The gas stove is the thing in the living room that heats water for tea and Basira uses for cooking, but its big job is to heat the house. Well, we want it to do those things anyway. It does its job until the city turns off the gas, which they do every night and on weekdays.

With no heat, I could see my breath in my bedroom Wednesday night. And again on Thursday night. Then on Friday morning I woke up to four inches of snow on the ground on top of ice from all the rain we had all week. My clothes were ice covered with snow.

Today (Sat) we had some sun, so a lot of it melted, but it’s 7pm now, so it’s getting dark and pretty cold, and unfortunately I have to go use the tualet… so I’ll let you know just how cold it is out there when I return…

Well, that took about 15 minutes. I put on a hat, down vest, and scarf, and another pair of socks, then I went outside, put on my shoes, and went to the hole-in-the-ground tualet. All of that was just a few minutes. When I was done I went back to the area by the front door, took off my shoes, and went inside, and when I stopped at the stove to warm my hands and feet I decided to pour some tea to really warm myself up. But there was no hot water. So I got my water bottle and went to the filter out on the porch to get some water I could boil. But the filter was empty. So I went back outside, put on my shoes, went to the well, reeled up a bucket of water, brought it upstairs, took off my shoes, went inside, poured the water into the filter, and took the bucket back outside. While I was reeling up the water, Basira had tilted the filter contraption on its side and got enough filtered water out of it for me to make some tea. That water is now starting to boil and I’ll have my tea (and warm hands) in a couple of minutes. And the water I just put into the filter will be filtered by tomorrow.

Here’s the water filter – the Peace Corps supplies all of us with one of these. You pour water into the top, and two chalk cylinders (“candles”) filter the water by gravity into the bottom. Next to it is a jar of Russian mayonnaise:

One of the biggest hassles here is dealing with shoes. I can see the point of not wanting to take shoes that you walk around in outside and wear them inside, but the whole point is lost when I take off my shoes, then walk through chicken poop in my socks to get back inside the house.

Here’s the setup: the stairway we use to go into the house has a landing where you take off your shoes. Most houses have that. From the landing to the door where you enter the house is a carpet that you walk on in your socks, and it’s meant to be kept clean. At our house (and most houses I’ve seen here) there are chickens. Basira frequently lets them out of their coop so they can run around, build up some muscle, and have some fun in the yard. She even lets them go out into the streets so they can eat grasses and stuff out on the road... and she closes the gate behind them so they roam alone. Somehow they know to stay away from cars, and they never, ever run away – not even Horace, the huge rooster with the big mouth that wakes me up every morning at 4:30. They always come home. But when they’re in the yard with no food and we’re inside, the chickens come up the stairway, past all the removed shoes, and up the clean carpet to the front door where they hang out and squawk until someone comes outside. They’re often there for hours, and sometimes they’re out there all night. But when they’re hanging out there, they poop all over the carpet, right in front of the door where we enter the house in our socks. So the bottoms of our socks have smushed chicken poop all over them.

I try to be careful and step around the poop, but not everyone is. Most people don’t even know it’s there – its color blends in with the red, gray, and beige striped carpet, so they step right in it. I can see the foot-poop smushes all over the place. So people are bringing in all sorts of bacteria and digested crud. Maybe even Avian Flu, which is prevalent in this part of the world. So – really – what’s the point of taking off the shoes? Socks end up inside shoes, inside other socks, and even in our sheets when it’s cold out. Shoes aren’t so ubiquitous. When we wear them inside, they tend to stay on the floor.

I think we should take the shoes off right at the door, or just inside the door – places where the chickens never go before they’re plucked and cooked. That’s been bugging me for months, and it feels good to finally tell someone about it.

Now my water is boiled and it’s time to go make my tea ….

Okay, all done. My hands are warm now from holding the tea cup. While I was up I also got my favorite wool socks from under the stove – they’re warm and dry now after a week of being wet and frozen.

My priorities keep shifting. A hot cup of tea is more valuable to me than it has ever been, since I live without heat most of the time and without running water all of the time. Also, I can’t drink caffeine, so the tea I drink has to come from the States and I’m very careful about how I handle it. I use one tea bag for at least three cups of tea. Three friends have helped me maintain my stash of caffeine-free tea while I’ve been here – Sallie, the friend with the fantastic Jockey clothing business I told you about on The Ides of March (smatlack@nc.rr.com),* Suzanne, my financial guru in Raleigh, and Elmir, my PCorps Program Manager, who brought me some when he returned from his US vacation in January. Sallie and Suzanne have been incredibly helpful in keeping me stocked with things I need.

*Note: I'm sorry to have to tell you that Sallie Matlack passed away on October 17, 2011. She is missed by many.

For Christmas my mom sent me caffeine-free tea, too. She also send me some things I didn’t know I needed - particularly the down jacket. It’s perfect for those trips to the tualet in January (and February, and today). It’s short, so it doesn’t get splashed on by tualet excrement, it has pockets for toilet paper, it's quick and easy to put on in the middle of the night, and it is super-warm.

Everyone gives me zip-lock bags, too, which are endlessly useful. Basira is used to using them now, too. She usually leaves food out on a counter on the porch in winter. Sometimes she covers food with plastic shopping bags (like the ones in US grocery stores), but not always, and there are always flies and other creatures around – even in sub-zero temps. So I started putting that food into zip-lock bags, and she’s gotten used to them. Luckily, I have dozens of them. They’re pretty valuable here.

Drinkable water is probably the most valuable thing I have, and luckily it’s not expensive. A two-liter bottle (about a half a gallon) is 50 qepik (about 40 cents). But is it ever heavy! I carried a couple of two liter bottles of good water home from the bazaar yesterday - that's a couple of miles - and my hand that held the plastic bag that carried the bottles was in intense pain by the time I got home. (I shoulda taken my cloth bag.) Our well water is undrinkable – it has to be filtered and boiled before using. That’s not hard, but if you’ve been reading this blog you know that can take a lot of time – like an entire day. So I try to keep store-bought Caucasus Mountain water on hand for when I don’t keep the water filter filled.

Dishes are washed in the portable sink outdoors, which has to be filled with well water before using it, and it only holds about a gallon. Nope, dishes are not washed with drinkable water. The main alternative is to do what Basira does most often, and that is to not wash them at all. She wipes dishes and silverware with a somewhat clean cloth... it's the same one she uses to wipe crud off the tables, counter top, stove, hands. I've never seen it washed. 

Bathing is a real chore. It takes a couple of hours to prepare to take a hot bucket bath at home, what with reeling about six or seven gallons of water up from the well and heating a few gallons of it on a gas stove. Basira says it’s easy, but I think she’s nuts. Her idea of easy is totally different from mine. To her, using an ATM is difficult, so I do it for her (she has to use the ATM to receive her government check - like Social Security). To me, prepping a bucket bath is hard, so she does it for me.

I take most of my bucket baths at work. Water is special there, too, but at least the water comes from faucets and is heated by a water heater. The water pressure is so low it’s meaningless without a bucket. With a bucket bath I can pour enough water on myself to feel wet and get my hair really wet. There's a shower there - a hand-held thing -but I can hold it over my head for 5 minutes without feeling very wet and never getting my hair fully wet. So I use a bucket at work, too. The bucket fills up slowly, but a few buckets get me wet and the bucket can keep filling while I’m doing other things, like scrubbing my itchy scalp.

I do miss high pressure showers, but the one thing I miss more than anything is having a hot bubble bath when I’m cold. One of these days I’m going to check into a Baku hotel just so I can have a bubble bath. Spring starts tomorrow, so I probably won’t need it until next winter.

A couple of Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) visited me today. One is working down in Lankaran – that’s a relatively big city in southern Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea, down by Iran. She’s from New York and has gained so much weight since she arrived in October, she has to buy new clothing. I eat a lot here – I mean a real lot – and I don’t gain weight. And I eat stuff I never ate in the States, like carbohydrates beyond anything I’ve eaten since I was a kid. I get less exercise than I’ve had in over 10 years, and I’m 30 years older than she is, so my metabolism has to be slower. Here’s a picture of Jessica, Basira, and Mariel (she lives in Samaxi) today:

So we talked about why she’s gaining and I’m not. One person said it’s because all of the food I eat is organic. But I ate lots of organic food in the States, too, and never, ever ate fast food or junk food. After some bantering, we narrowed it down to the energy I expend staying warm.

The problem is that her home always has heat. Her bedroom even has a stove and the gas is always available there. At my home the gas is shut off more than half the time. And even when we have gas, it’s never really warm in here. There’s one tiny stove in the house, in the living room. It’s like a wood-burning stove, but it has a gas hose going into it. That’s it. Oh, and there’s a stove downstairs in the hemam – that’s the place where people take bucket baths – it’s far away from where we are and its stove is only turned on when someone is bathing in there.

Here’s the corner of the hemam where all the water and soaps sit. One of the white buckets is full of hot water (very hot – right off the stove), and the other has cold water right out of the well (very cold). The huge metal teapot thing has more hot water and the silver thing on the table has a mixture of hot and cold. I add hot water and cold water to that to get the temperature I want.

The blue plastic pan is what I use to dump water on myself.

Here’s the stove inside the hemam – this is taken from the door and the buckets are off to the right, out of view:

My clothes and towel hang on the door:

My bedroom rarely has heat; usually its door to the living room is kept closed to save money (as I mentioned in an earlier blog, the door to the outside is kept open all the time, but the doors inside are kept shut to save money… go figure that one out for me please). Today, because of the holiday, the door to my room is open, so warm air can come in from the living room and it’s pretty warm in there. But when I brought the PCV who is gaining weight in there today she thought it was very cold. At night my room is freezing, but the area on my sheets where my body stays is very warm – I even take off some of my socks in the middle of the night (on nights like these I start off wearing two or three pair). All of that heat is generated by me. I don’t move around much at night because the area outside my body space is so cold. According to the news the outside, temperature has been just under freezing for the last few nights (-3C), so it’s probably in the high 30’s inside; maybe mid-40’s. Well, it looks like I've gotten used to it.

When I did the laundry outside last Saturday, I wore a short-sleeved t-shirt and it felt warm outside to me. Getting wet when I was elbow-deep in the water didn’t make me cold at all. Later I found out it was around 55 degrees that day. So, the PCV who is gaining weight and I decided that I must burn off the calories keeping myself warm. In the future I’ll skip the diets and fancy low-cal foods! I’ll just live in a cold climate and save myself a lot of money, save the planet a lot of energy and burn thousands of calories by turning down the heat.

Oh – awhile back I promised you a picture of my “automatic washing machine” – the contraption that I wash my clothes in. It’s totally manual; it’s ringers don’t work and I have to swish the clothing inside it around by hand, but it does help me get the job done. My hands are aging fast, though. Tide detergent isn’t meant for human skin.
Here’s that picture I promised you:

And here’s the washing setup outside – the clean clothes sit in water in the blue plastic bin while they wait to be rinsed. You can see the well in the back; the white buckets are used to carry water from the well’s bucket:

 And my laundry on the line, about three hours later:

And here’s Mariel and Basira with a bowl full of chicken pluckings (probably Horace), which are used to fill pillows. Mariel lives in Samaxi, too, so she and Basira know each other well... until next time (tomorrow)...