Busy?
First of all summer is not the utopia I expected. Instead, summer has kind of been the ultimate practical joke…. on me. We were supposed to have a lavish garden with all sorts of exotic fruits and vegetables. And by exotic I really just mean your standard tomatoes, cucumbers, and cabbage, whatever. Well all the irrigation water was redirected to the big commercial fields so we had no water and all of our plants died, which means not only do we not have an all-access pass to vegetables as I was promised but now we won’t be able to can anything for the winter. Potatoes and pasta it is. Again. For 8 months. Again.
So I’ve had running water for about a total of 2 weeks since the summer began. This wouldn’t be so much of an issue but our main village source of water was also shut off for a while which means really bad news. When water does run from the main source that means I have to take our rickety-ass, rusty wheelbarrow uphill, barefoot, both ways (do I sound like one of your grandparents yet?) with a water jug that doesn’t completely close, which takes a lot of maneuvering to make sure that all my hard work isn’t spilled out on the semi-paved roads. Mind you this is all in the blistering heat of about a billion degrees. So that’s water.
On one particular day, during our housecleaning session when I was hauling water several times, I saw ahead of me something that elicited what I can only describe as Cart Envy. I stood awestruck and almost perplexed by the guy who was getting water ahead of me. He had a dolly with a platform and on the platform there was a huge pail; it fit perfectly on the spigot; filled completely, and then he did something I hadn’t seen before; capped it with a cover and off he went, not a drop lost on the way, the big wheels not even noticing the ruts in the road. As I filled my wheelbarrow, it was the first time in-country that I was like, “I WANT one of those, Now!” He had the SUV equivalent of a water cart. When he finished I realized that I had been staring at him, open-mouthed the entire time and I even had to wipe a little drool away when he was done. Back in America I assessed cute clothes and nice cars, here a nice, sturdy water cart makes me jealous.
Electricity is another thing. I forgot everything I’m supposed to know about circuits that I learned from the 8th grade but the idea comes back pretty quickly when one person on the street doesn’t pay and the entire street gets shut off. I expected not to have electricity for over a month but luckily it was only for two weeks. I’m guessing someone got hassled by the neighbors. My plan was to take vacation leave and go to Lake Issy-kul but the day I planned to leave, the electricity and water was running again. How’s that for timing?
One thing I cannot complain about is how cheap the vegetables are now. You can get a kilo of tomatoes for about 7 som (about 10 cents) and a lot of other stuff really cheaply. But with no electricity, it was hard to cook anything, and when it’s super-hot the last thing I want to do is eat. Plus my body wasn’t used to getting vitamins and nutrients so my bowels were definitely not in check either. On the other hand, the fruit here is sweeter, fresher and tastier than any fruit I’ve ever had before. I’ve never been a big fan of apricots but here they’re juicy and sweet and I ate an entire kilo (around 2 pounds for all you metrically challenged kids) of them in one day. And the raspberries too. Little old grandmas sell them on the side of random streets for 40 som for a liter. Those suckers did not last long. Before I knew it I finished the entire liter and my lips and fingertips were stained raspberry red for a good 2 days.
I had my third I.V. since being in country, any more and I’m going to start to show track marks. After nearly 5 hours of exams and tests, it turns out that I had bacterial and viral infections at the same time and also worms. Yup. Worms. Not even the awesome kind where you get to eat whatever you want and not gain weight. Just the plain old nasty ones. One more test though and I will be completely worm-free. I love my doctor and she takes really good care of me, but she said the most unintentionally funny thing I’ve ever heard. When they took my stool sample she came back in and was like, “that is definitely not normal. That smells really bad.” You know it’s bad when you can gross out your own doctors.
posted by Katie P. at 4:34 AM
1 Comments:
No offense, but i think you've been following my footsteps. lol
I was a JMU grad a few hears back and then was k12 in Jalalabad! Crazy! Hope you have fun! and Goodluck! John Gangi jgangi86@hotmail.com
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