Happy Birthday, Elizabeth!

This week Elizabeth turned six.  She has been waiting to turn six for quite a long time, and has been counting down the months since this summer, the weeks since we arrived in Dushanbe, and the days for the last few weeks.  It's been a much-anticipated birthday.  

She had a very happy birthday, which started with crepes for breakfast, followed by a trip to the embassy to pick up mail and pumpkins.  Thankfully the mail included her birthday presents (I misjudged exactly how long the mail takes to make its agonizingly slow progress all the way to Dushanbe), so it was an extra happy mail trip.  

The rest of her day was filled with whatever she wanted to do, with the exception of a Russian lesson, and ended with a delicious dinner of Kraft macaroni and cheese (her choice), vanilla cake with vanilla frosting (also her choice), and the thing she'd been waiting for the last six months - presents!

One of the great things about being the youngest of seven children is that all your older siblings have the money, inclination, and ability to give you presents.  It was a toss up between Eleanor's present - a handmade blanket and halter for her model horse - and William's - a whole entire kilo of candy - for the best sibling of the day award.  

One of the great things about being six is that there are so many things that can make you happy.  It's nice to have a child who is thrilled with things like candy, books, dresses, and watercolor sets.  I love the easiness of making Elizabeth happy.

I remember when Kathleen turned six - she was the oldest of four children and I felt like she was halfway to being able to vote.  Compared to the ages of my other children - four, two, and not yet one, she was the wise, ancient one who I depended as my right-hand girl.  Six was such an incredibly useful, mature age.  She was in first grade! She could read! And more importantly, she could read to her siblings! She could follow directions and be trusted to actually do what I asked her to!

Elizabeth can do all of those things also - and some things that Kathleen couldn't do at six (like ride a bike) - but they're no longer wondrous any more because six people before her have already done them at all.  So instead of being my right-hand girl, she's my just-stay-little-a-little-longer girl.  But Elizabeth is just as eager to get big and grow up as her siblings were before her, so I will have to snatch my cuddles and story time and opportunities to carry her one last time where I can.  

It is bittersweet to have my last child be six years old.  I love that all of my children are completely independent now.  It's beautiful to tell them all to bathe themselves and get ready for bed - and they do it.  When we go out, it's no longer the crazy monkey circus that it used to be.  Traveling hardly counts as work any more.  My life is much calmer and I get a lot more done now.

But I also don't have babies falling asleep in my arms in that soft, boneless, bottomless sleep that only a baby can fall into.  I can't fix all of life's problems with a kiss and a cuddle, and the height of happiness can't be found in a wild round of tickling.  

That part of my life has ended, and I will never return to it.  It felt endless while I was in it, but now it feels like it passed in the blink of an eye.  Time is like that - it plays tricks on you while you're not looking or paying attention and your seeming eternity of young children is gone forever.

However, Elizabeth is still only six and hasn't yet left me for good, so I intend to enjoy all of the sweetness of a six year old girl that still writes me love notes and wants a story (or three) every night.  There's no need to rush; she'll have time enough to grow up.

Barricade Runner

This week Vladimir Putin came to town.  He comes to Dushanbe from time to time, but according to Brandon, there are various levels of visits with various levels of protocol.  The visit this time was a state visit, which means that there is a lot of fuss (and a whole lot of flowers, judging by the media photos).  

He and President Rahmon went and saw a lot of stuff - factories, parks, government buildings - and they even dropped by the Russian school that is located next to our neighborhood.  I got to watch a little media clip about his visit, which included a long section about the school and how all the kids there are evidently quite excited about learning Russian.  My favorite part of the clip was when the camera panned over to the embassy (the next-door neighbor of the Yuri Gagarin Russian school), and the newscaster excitedly told his audience that they also speak Russian at the U.S. Embassy.  See - even the Americans want to speak Russian! 

Which, to be fair, is at least true for these Americans associated with the U.S. Embassy, as we're paying teachers a lot of money to teach all six of our kids three times a week.  So he's not wrong.  

All of these visits have caused complete chaos throughout the city for the past few days.  Because every time the whole entourage goes anywhere, the roads get shut down.  And they're not shut down for just a few minutes - they're often shut down for over an hour so that a few cars can spend a few minutes driving down them without having to be bothered by the cars and traffic caused peons driving on the road.  Schools have been closed, bazaars have been shut down, and half the employees at the embassy have been teleworking because they can't get in to work.  

The schedule for road shut downs might possibly be announced in advance, but if they are, nobody has been telling us.  Since Putin showed up on Thursday, our community chat has mainly consisted of people reporting the locations of closed roads.  These reports are often accompanied by a picture of stopped traffic, as the exact location of roads that are currently closed is unfortunately only known by getting stuck in the closure.  

Our family has been able to avoid all of these road closures because: 1. the kids are homeschooled and 2. Brandon walks to work.  A hermit lifestyle can be useful sometimes.  

On Friday morning, however, I had an orthodontist appointment for the kids.  It probably wasn't the wisest plan to schedule the appointment when I knew that roads would be shut down, but I found alternate routes just in case I ran into a road closure.  However, luck was on my side, and the road was not only open, but quite clear Friday morning.  The consult went well (according to the orthodontist, Joseph's mouth will be a 'complicated case'), and I was happy to find someone who could get to work on both Joseph and Edwin.  

During the consult, the orthodontist informed me that the boys both needed x-rays, which were not availabe at his clinic.  However, they gave me a referral card with a map, and told me that I could just walk in to the other clinic and get them done that day.  I looked at the map, noted that the clinic was much closer to the excitement than the orthodontist, and decided to gamble.

This time, however, I lost.  We made it to within a block of the clinic before coming a complete standstill.  Not one to give up with my goal in sight, I was able to make it through three lanes of traffic (Tajik drivers are much nicer than Kazakh ones), pull a u-turn, and park on a side street so that we could just walk to the clinic.  Which was, sadly, closed.

The kids and I hiked back to the car, hopped in, and then couldn't go anywhere.  Now both sides of the roads were closed and we were going to have to just wait until it opened up again - whenever that would be.  I turned off the car, opened the windows, and settled in for the long wait.  After about fifteen minutes, one of the drivers in front of me started making motions for me to back up.  He was quite insistent about it, so I started backing up, thinking that he needed to back up himself.  

After I had backed up, he started motioning for me to pull around all the other cars waiting to be released from road-closure purgatory.  Mystified and unsure, I pulled around the cars, but stopped at the truck that was blocking the road.  My Tajik friend motioned wildly - go around the truck he seemed to be saying.

So I went around the truck and onto the road, where there was a policeman stopping traffic.  I stopped when I saw him, but then he started waving at me.  But it wasn't to stop - it was to go.  Unsure why my diplomatic status entitled me to drive down a blocked road when everyone else had to wait, I hesitated.  "Go! Go!" he shouted at me in Russian, and so I went.  Red plates for the win.  I had no desire to see how much longer we had to wait, and a desire for equality rarely persists when you get the better end of inequality.  

Yesterday, we took the kids to the pool.  The current temperatures in Dushanbe are about on par with a warm July in Astana, so we're enjoying our extended summer immensely while chortling about the current sub-freezing temperatures that those in Astana are suffering.   It was a lovely day - warm, sunny, and cloudless, with the sky a deep blue.  The kids enjoyed the novelty of swimming in October - this exact same weekend a year ago saw Sophia pulling on snow pants to go walk a dog - and after about an hour we headed home.

Normally, we just walk to the embassy, as it's just about as quick to walk as to drive (the traffic patterns necessitate driving about three times the actual distance because we can't turn left), but not wanting to tromp down the road in wet swimsuits following our swim, we just drove.  Happy from having had a nice swim, everyone piled into the car, and I started pulling out of the embassy - only to be met by another policeman frantically waving his stick.

This time he was most definitely not telling us to go.  Unsure of how long this newest road closure would last, we sat and waited.  When the road continued to stay closed, we parked and waited.  When the road was still closed, we went back to the pool - it's always better to wait at the pool than in the car.

There was another family stuck at the pool also, so we waited together.  After awhile we were joined by other inmates who had been refused exit by the stick-waving man.  The waiting started patiently, but after another half hour, it started to get more impatient.  By the second half hour, it turned to grumbling.  And by the third half hour, plans were made.  

If we all went out together maybe our stick-waving friend couldn't stop everyone at once.  After all, what could one man with a stick do against a crowd of irritated American diplomats intent on escaping their containment?  We had cars.  He had a stick.  The stick always loses.  

So we all gathered up our things and our courage.  I hustled the kids into the car.  Everyone buckled up their seatbelts.  I scouted out the stick-waving man.  Still there.  The cars slowly backed out of their parking spaces and lined up while a local staff member looked on.  Would it work?  Would we get stopped?  What would they do?  What could they do?  

My hands were shaking as they gripped the steering wheel.  I'm an American.  Part of being an American is following the rules.  When the light turns red, you stop.  When the road says 'one way,' you don't drive down it.  When there's a line at the DMV, you stand in it.  Everyone following the rules is what makes the US functional - it's what is done.  Breaking the rules is, well, against the rules.  

But I was committed, and at the head of the line of cars.  I gunned the engine, headed for the exit, and turned right.  As we approached, our stick-waving friend jumped out and wildly started waving his stick.  I kept driving.  He added his whistle to his stick-waving.  I drove faster.  Seeing that the stick and whistle weren't deterring us, he started shouting.  Brandon waved at him as we blew past.

Having escaped the embassy, we roared down the road to our neighborhood, just past the now-infamous Yuri Gagarin Russian School.  Passing plainclothes men patrolling the sidewalks (this time not just the roads, but the sidewalks were shut down), more policemen, and several police cars, we pulled a hard left into our neighborhood - which was filled with more policemen, more cars, and more men in dark suits looking official and looming.  

We punched through and finally made it to our street, which was blissfully empty.  Pulling into our gate, I sat for a moment, calming down from my nerve-wracking experiment with rule-breaking.  I don't care what other people say - it isn't fun to break the rules.  

Shortly after, I read through our neighborhood chat and found out the reason for our containment - Putin and Rahmon had been meeting at a house one street over.  I can only imagine what all of those security people thought when they saw a red-plated American diplomatic car roaring past all their measures meant to keep the rest of the world separated from the two presidents having a quiet tet-a-tet.  Hopefully it only involved head-shaking for the arrogance of Americans and nothing more.

Thankfully Putin has left, the road closures have ended, and life (and traffic) can continue in its usual pattern.  But I've learned my lesson.  Next time any president comes to town for any kind of state visit, and most especially the Russian president, I'm not pressing my luck.  I'm not going to take my chances, I'm not going to flirt with rule-breaking, and I'm not going to try and drive anywhere.  I'm just staying home.  

Change in Plans

A few weeks ago I found a firm mass in my abdomen.  I'm not very conversant with the usual makeup of my abdomen - it's not something I worry about most of the time - so after consulting with Google and then Brandon, I went to see the doctor here at post.  He confirmed both Brandon's and Google's opinion that there aren't supposed to be firm things (with the exception of babies) hanging out in your abdomen.  I got a bunch of blood tests, an ultrasound, and a CT scan.  None were able to provide satisfactory answers, so Brandon and I decided to send the children and me back to the US five weeks early.

I've come to know the disjoint that comes from a sudden and unexpected change in plans.  It's only happened once before, when we were evacuated from Cairo during the Arab Spring.  That change came so suddenly that I remember sitting in my hotel in Athens thinking that we might still be able to stay in Cairo and wait it out.  As soon as this thought would enter my head, I would look around and realize that we were already gone.  It took a few days, but before long the new course of events was the new normal and everything that had happened seemed foreordained and sensible.

So when the mind-bending change came this time, I knew what was happening.  It only lasts a few days, but the mental stutter that happens as you adjust to the new plan is very disorienting.  It takes time to get the new story to stick your brain, and meanwhile you catch yourself thinking "What should we do for Novruz? I'm glad we have Novruz holiday so I can pack."

It's even more disorienting this time because we made the decision to leave weeks before the children and I will actually leave.  My situation isn't dire enough to need a medevac, so we've had to get Brandon's orders changed to reflect my earlier departure.  Bureaucratic wheels turn slowly and so while we've been waiting to see when we can leave, I've played like life is normal.  The children and I finished our last week of school, I hosted Ladies' Night, Brandon and I have gone out, we took the children to the park.  But the whole time, the little voice in the back of my head keeps shouting, "You're leaving! You're never coming back! You have no idea what is wrong with you! Now is a perfect time time to freak out!"  I try and quiet it with ordinary concerns like what we're having for dinner or which clothes I want to pack for a 4-? month stint of living out of suitcases.

We had a surprise four-day weekend last week, so Brandon and I spent two of those days purging the house so that twenty-three pounds of crayon drawings and seventeen pounds of ratty books don't get sent all the way to Tashkent only to fill up their landfill space.  But a lot of things just won't get done.  It's interesting how many things in the necessary category can be shifted to the optional one when you're faced with a contraction of available time.  After all, it isn't necessary for blankets to be clean and toys to be organized just so they can be thrown in boxes and loaded onto a truck.

I feel a little like a book returned to the library with the last chapter left unread.  You know all of the important details, who married who and how the villain got their just desserts, but you don't get the satisfying closure that ties up all the loose ends and leaves you emotionally satisfied.  There are friends I've said 'see you later' but not 'goodbye' to.  We won't make it up to the mountains for one last hike.  That farewell party that I've been planning for the last year will have to be thrown by someone else.  My carefully hoarded food will now just be casually given away instead of savored for that last amazing meal.  I'll never teach that much-promised class on how to make doughnuts.

But in the end, we were always going to leave.  There was always going to be a last hike, last meal, last party, last night out with friends.  I just didn't realize that they'd already happened.  Eventually we'll almost forget how we left hastily, furtively, in the middle of the night like a song cut off halfway through the last verse.  We'll only remember the forty-one months we lived here and not the forty-second that didn't happen.  And then when something reminds us, we'll laugh and think how we had everything planned so perfectly and then so foolishly assumed those plans would work out - because who ever gets to live their plans exactly the way they plan them?

But for now, I still feel the absence of that forty-second month and the last chapter I didn't get here in Dushanbe.  But I also know that the loss, like everything in life, will pass eventually.  All in good time.

Living in Dushanbe: Winter Travel

Tajikistan is the most mountainous country in the world.  I've always been fond of superlatives, and so it's kind of cool to say that I live in the most mountainous country in the world.  According to Wikipedia (always a reliable source, I know), "93% of Tajikistan is mountainous with altitudes ranging from 300 m (980 ft) to almost 7,500 m (24,600 ft), and nearly 50% of Tajikistan's territory is above 3,000 m (9,800 ft)."

The mountains in Tajikistan are in three major chains, and those chains divide the country into three different regions.  If you want to go from one region to another, there's only one reliable way to get there: driving.  There aren't any train tracks that cross the mountains.  There is a flight that goes to Khujand, in the north, but it operates fairly unreliably, only flying when there are enough passengers to fill the flight.  If you want to go east to the Pamirs, a foundation owns a helicopter, but it is reportedly grounded because it can't be repaired.  

This past summer, Brandon was contacted by some visitors that wanted to check on a few sites where they were funding work.  They passed along their itinerary to Brandon who just about died laughing when he saw it.  One project was in Bukhara, a twelve-hour drive from Dushanbe, and the next was in the Pamirs, a two- or three-day drive from Dushanbe.  Listed was, "July 10, travel from Bukhara to Khorog."  He helpfully informed them that they might want to include a little more time for that leg of their travel. 

Tajikistan, in addition to being mountainous, also has some mostly very bad roads.  There are 'highways' that go throughout the country, but you don't have to go very far (in some cases about ten feet) before the pavement turns into dirt/gravel/formerly pavement but now mostly potholed roads.  And even the highways can be treacherous.  A few years ago we met a traveling photographer who had visited, at that time 158 countries.  He had traveled to the Pamirs on the 'highway' - the only paved road in the region - and declared it to be the absolute worst highway he had ever ridden on.  Last year some non-US diplomats died when their car went over the side of the same highway.

Driving in Tajikistan is not for the faint-hearted.  But when you get winter involved, sometimes it's just not for anybody at all.  

Khujand, in the north, is the second major city after Dushanbe and so there is a lot of embassy travel to visit with various contacts.  Recently Brandon was put in charge of arranging a trip to go up for a visit.  I like to check the weather and when I noticed the forecast, I showed Brandon.  "It says that there is supposed to be rain in Dushanbe for the three days of your trip.  Do you think it will snow up in the mountains?"  He checked the forecast, and it was calling for over a foot of snow over three days.

Driving up over the pass isn't really an exercise for the faint-hearted - the grade gets pretty steep and there aren't any guard rails between the edge and thousand-foot drops.  Add in an endless progression of slowly climbing tractor-trailers (the only way to get goods from the north to the south and vice versa as there aren't any trains) with insane Tajiks passing on blind curves and it is a ride that will keep you awake no matter how sleepy you are.  

Brandon went online checked with the Tajik road service.  They warned everyone of the impending snow storm and recommended that nobody try and get to Khujand for the next several days.  He checked with the Tajiks who worked at the embassy.  "Khujand?" they asked him, "We don't really think that's a good idea right now.  It is winter, after all.  Why don't you try in the spring?"

And then he visited with the embassy drivers.  One driver regaled him with tales of trying to get to Khujand in the snow.  "See, what happens is someone gets impatient with the trucks and tries to pass them.  But then they meet cars in the other lane and everyone get snarled up and it takes forever to get it sorted out.  One time we waited in the snow for six hours for the traffic to finally clear out so we could get over the pass.  Another time we waited for three or four hours before giving up and turning around.  I had been passing time with a guy who was taking some people up to Khujand, so I gave him my phone number and told him to give me a call when he finally got there.  He called me the next morning, sixteen hours after I turned around.  So, if it's all the same to you, I'd rather just stay here.  Have you thought about going in the spring?"

In the middle of these conversations, I reminded Brandon of the last time he went to Khujand in February.  He made it safely back to Dushanbe, only a few hours before several avalanches trapped people on the road for days.  We saw the remains of one of the avalanches four months later in May, and the snow was still ten feet deep over the river.  Had he perhaps thought about going in the spring?

By this point, Brandon decided that perhaps spring might be a better idea.  He talked with colleagues and they called off the trip.

We enjoyed three days of rain in Dushanbe, the most precipitation we've had all fall and winter.  Thursday evening, he came home from work.  "So, it's a good thing that we didn't go up to Khujand.  It snowed buckets up in the mountains and this afternoon there was an avalanche on the road up to the pass.  The entire road is shut down until they get it cleared out."

It sounds like spring indeed is a fine time to travel north.

The Week When Everything Broke

The former Soviet Union is not an area of the world known for its high construction standards.  It wasn't great when the Soviets were in charge and it hasn't gotten much better in the decades following.  At one point, all of the embassy residences got inspected for earthquake safety, and not a single house passed the inspection.  Our house, new in late 2014, has numerous large cracks in the walls and a set of balcony doors doesn't close quite right because the walls have settled and the doorway has gone out of square.  It's a major miracle that most of the bridges up in the mountains haven't collapsed, and I'm pretty sure that a building inspector hasn't set foot in most of the villages either.

So, stuff breaks here.  A lot.  We have personally broken five toilet seats during our three years here.  One broke while Eleanor was using it, and she came to me sobbing, trying to explain that she hadn't done anything to break it - she was just sitting on it!  A few years ago our outside water meter broke when it got below freezing and it took five months to get it replaced.  About a quarter of the tiles in our downstairs bathrooms have popped off and had to be re-stuck.  I don't know how many times the shower head hoses in the bathrooms have had to be replaced; they probably should be put on a six-month replacement schedule.  About a third of the lights in the house don't work because the wiring just broke.  Every time someone comes to replace the bulbs (they're difficult to change), they dutifully put new bulbs in the broken lights and then figure they've done the job.

Usually something breaks every couple of weeks and I save them up for a monthly or bi-monthly work order party when everything gets done at once.  So it's not like everything is happening at once, but it is a definite slow, annoying trickle.

That is, until last week. 

It all started with the power.  The power in our house is terrible and has been terrible since the day we moved in.  We have put in untold work orders and the landlord has tried myriad fixes, but nothing has ever worked quite right.  We usually have enough power to get our normal day work done.  But if it's a cold day and I'm trying to cook dinner, microwave food, and dry clothes at the same time, the load is too much for the power supply and the generator turns on, which turns everything off.  Then it turns off because suddenly the load is fine because nothing is running.  This is something that I will definitely not miss when we leave.

Recently it has been getting worse and randomly turning on, turning off, turning on, turning off, turning on, and turning off for fifteen or twenty cycles.  Every time the generator turns on, everything in the house turns off and when the generator turns off, once again we have a few seconds of darkness.  One day it took ten minutes to microwave my lunch because of this.  Finally, after a few weeks, I called facilities maintenance (FM) and told them to come take a look.  They came, took a look, turned on our generator, and left. 

Now, a whole house generator is very nice but it is also very, very noisy, especially when it's in a high-walled concrete courtyard. After awhile it gets on your nerves, but we had no idea when it would be turned off again.  One rule that we were impressed with: never ever touch the generator.  It has power going through it, very dangerous.

I figured, however, that while the generator was running, I would take advantage of a reliable power supply and warm the house up.  This all happened after it snowed and got down into the teens for several nights in a row and so our house had gotten cold.  The radiators in our house keep it quite comfy when it is between forty and fifty-five degrees outside, anything below gets increasingly chilly and anything above gets too hot.  I long for the day when I will have central heat.

In addition to our radiators, we also have split-pack heat pumps that work as AC units and heaters.  But because of our bad power, we haven't been able to run them as heaters.  So I turned one on in my room (sixty-six degrees!), the study (sixty-three degrees), and two on the third floor where I was teaching school (sixty-two degrees).  I should have stopped when one of the circuit breakers flipped and the generator let out an ominous cough of black smoke, but I didn't.  I just reset the circuit and went back to turning my house into somewhere that didn't need a wool cardigan and a down jacket to keep warm in. 

A few minutes later, everything went dead.  The generator stopped and there was no power coming in from the city line.  So, I called FM (their number is on speed dial) and they assured me someone would be coming.

When I went outside to let them in, I noticed water spraying from our outside water meter.  The face of the water meter is glass (why they don't use plastic I can't figure out), and it had cracked during the below-freezing temperatures of the previous few days.  So, while they were fixing the generator, they turned off our outside water.  Again.

Later that day I noticed ceramic shards around our outside sink.  The same freezing temperatures that had done in our water meter had also taken out the sink.  Oh goody.

When Brandon came home from work the next day, he informed me that the 'check engine' light was on in the car.  He took it in and the mechanic told him that we needed new oxygen sensors. 

The same day I noticed that our distiller had stopped working and called my FM buddies, for the fifth time that week.

We have to pay our internet monthly, in cash, and this month it ran out eight days early.  When we finally reached the glorious day when we would have a whole new sixty gigs to consume the outside world with, nothing happened.  Brandon talked to someone at work who talked to the internet company who then (amazingly) fixed the problem.  I also daydream about things like Google Fiber.

Thursday morning, while I was teaching school, Kathleen started complaining of dizziness.  I told her to go and get a drink of water and something to eat.  She did, came back up, and started feeling dizzy again.  A minute or two later I started feeling dizzy and Edwin did too.  We all beat a hasty retreat down from the third floor and I called FM for the tenth time that week.  They came, turned off the generator - which had been running for over two days - and tested the air to make sure everything was okay.  It was.

And then, to wrap up the week, we had an earthquake.  It wasn't much of an earthquake - 6.1 a few hundred miles away - and I didn't believe Joseph when he told me the table was shaking.  But, it was a fitting end to a somewhat crazy week.  Fingers crossed that this week will be better.

Sledding Saturday

This year has been a bad year for snow in Tajikistan and so we've only gone sledding once, up at the ski resort.  This past week it snowed three or four inches on Monday.  And then Friday night, without much warning, it snowed again.  We didn't get much here in Dushanbe (it was mostly rain which is fine with me), but I knew that there would be a lot of snow in the mountains.  Time to go sledding.

The only problem was that there was a high level visitor in town and Brandon had to be a note-taker at several meetings.  I asked him if we could squeeze in a quick trip before his meetings, but he said that he didn't want to get stuck and then explain to everyone why he wasn't there for the meetings.  Jobs can get really tiresome sometimes, especially when they happen on the first snowy Saturday of the year.

But, in a completely uncharacteristic twist, he told us that we were free to go without him.  I was pretty shocked, but took him up on the offer. 

When we made it to our hill, the snow was perfectly pristine with four or five inches of fresh powder on top of the snow that had fallen earlier this week.  I'm not a big winter fan, but I do love going up in the mountains for some beautiful fresh snow on a clear, mostly sunny day.  

After two and a half hours of sledding, the snow was nothing like pristine, but the sled runs had gotten nicely packed down and pretty dang fast.  We brought up a half-gallon of hot herbal tea (the former Soviet Union is getting to us) and everyone enjoyed sledding and drinking tea and sledding some more.  William, in characteristic baby fashion, wanted absolutely nothing to do with that weird cold white stuff and stayed on my lap or strapped to my front the entire time.

I'm hoping that we can get a few more sledding Saturdays in before winter comes to an end, and next time Brandon will be able to come along.  Fingers crossed!

Living in Dushanbe: Entertainment

There are a lot of things about Dushanbe that aren't the greatest.  There's a good reason it's a thirty percent differential.  It's a colossal pain to get here, the medical care is practically nonexistent, the air can get pretty unpleasantly thick in the winter, the driving is completely nonsensical, and you can't see Star Wars in English in the theater.  This last one was such a hardship that a friend took her son up to Almaty to see the movie there.

But one of the really great things about Dushanbe is how cheap many things are.  The fresh produce is cheap (I love getting ripe summer tomatoes for fifteen cents a kilo), the household help is cheap, the restaurants and cheap, and, one of my personal favorites, the entertainment is cheap.

The week after Christmas, I took Kathleen, Sophia, Eleanor, and Joseph to see The Nutcracker.  It wasn't the best ballet performance (some friends who had gotten used to Russian-quality ballet walked out), but it was reasonably good, especially for small children.  When Brandon was picking up tickets earlier, he asked how much they cost.  "Oh," I texted him, "probably less than a hundred Somoni." "Per ticket?" he replied.  "No, for all the tickets," I laughed.  The tickets came to sixty Somoni - which is $6.85.  I took myself and four children to see a live ballet performance for less than the cost of one matinee showing of a movie in America.

Sometimes we take children to the local amusement park when we really feel like splashing out.  We only do it for special occasions because it is kind of pricey.  There is an entrance fee and then you pay per ride, which adds up when you have five children riding rides.  But, we are generous parents and so we let them ride all the rides they want.  And usually it all adds up to about twenty-five dollars.  This is about how much we would drop on one ride for each child at a state fair.

There is a local water park, Delphin, that we sometimes go to.  It's actually pretty decent for Tajikistan, with a big pool, a little kid pool, a big kid pool with waterslides, and five big waterslides.  There are lots of lifeguards and the pool is remarkably clean, sometimes cleaner than the embassy pool.  I usually stay for the whole four hours (it's so popular that you can only stay four hours) and get lunch for everyone because I like their french fries and I don't want to get home at two or three in the afternoon with a bunch of hungry kids.  The last time we went, I spent a little over forty dollars for four entrances (Eleanor and William were free) and five lunches.

This new year's day we took the children bowling.  There is a bowling alley in the national tea house (Yes, this makes no sense.  There's also a movie theater and pool hall) that is actually really nice.  It's an AMF bowling alley, complete with video screen that show all of the hokey cartoons for strikes and spares and gutter balls.  We were having a fun time, so we stayed for a couple of hours and bowled two games.  It takes a long time to bowl two games with six people.  At the end Brandon paid up (they charge by the hour) and the total came - with shoes - to sixteen dollars.

When we went up to Safed Dara last week, we took a lot of cash with us (our rule of thumb in cash-only societies is to take way, way more than you think you might ever need).  After all, we were taking seven people (William never counts except on international flights) tubing, feeding them all lunch, and then on a gondola ride.  I used to ski in college, and I know how pricey gondola rides are.  The methodology of well-organized places in cash societies is to get a swipe card that you put a bunch of cash on and then use it to pay for everything (I imagine it is to keep the workers from pocketing spare change).  So Brandon put a lot of cash on it, and in the end, everything added up to fifty-two dollars.

I was talking with my sister who lives in North Carolina and she was bemoaning how expensive it is to do anything with her kids.  Bowling was $75, a movie was the same, and a cheap take-out dinner was $50 - and she only has four children.  Usually when I talk with my sister, I remember all of the things I miss about America.  She'll mention going to the library or the beach or Target or show me the new bookshelves she got at Target and I'll feel a little bit sad that I'm stuck in the middle of Central Asia where the closest Target is several plane rides away.

But this time I was on the (silently) gloating end.  We still don't have Target and English movies are very rare thing and parking lots are non-existent and blueberries are even more non-existent.  But, I can go do fun stuff with my six children without breaking the bank.  Dushanbe for the win.

Return to the Mountains

My family has been very happy on Saturdays for the past year or so.  When we first arrived in Dushanbe, I would drag them up to the mountains to hike almost every Saturday that I could.  I like being outside and I like exploring, so hiking is the perfect thing for someone like me.  

My children like not having to drag themselves up steep hills for an undetermined amount of time.  My husband likes not having to drag the children up steep hills, too.  But, I'm not a very nice mom and I once read in an Ensign article that it's good for families to do hard things together.  And they mentioned hiking by name, so no amount of whining could trump the combination of my love for hiking backed up by religious endorsement.

But then my thyroid stopped working and then I got pregnant and then I had a newborn and then it got hot and then it was brown and ugly in the mountains and so we just kind of stopped hiking.  Like I said, everyone was happy.

Usually the winter is a win-win time for everyone because we can go sledding.  I can be outside and the children willingly hike up steep slopes because they can sled down them.  But this winter has been very, very dry and sledding hasn't happened at all.  I started getting antsy, so this past Saturday I hauled everyone up into the mountains to go hiking.  

I found a likely hiking route on Google maps (this is how you find hiking routes in Tajikistan: look for a valley with a village at the mouth, drive to the end of the village, park the car, and start hiking.  This works every time).  Well, almost every time.  My chosen route, which was tantalizingly filled with trees (there aren't many trees here because they all get chopped down for firewood), turned out to be barred by a gate.  Brandon's Russian skills read the sign that informed us it was a science preserve or something like that.  So that's why the trees, I guess.  Our next route had an extremely sketchy bridge, so we went to option #3. 

The drive started out a little sketchy and we almost gave up, but Brandon, aided by four-wheel drive, persevered and we eventually found a place wide enough to park the car (a very important part hiking: being able to turn the car around when it's time to leave).  Everyone got out and started hiking.  It started off with a good bit of whining and at one point Brandon had William on his back and Eleanor on his shoulders.

But I was a magnanimous mother and let everyone stop (even though I could have hiked for another couple of hours) after forty-five minutes and eat their snacks.  Because they still only come for the snacks.  Unfortunately someone (me) had left the water back at the house, but it was pretty cold so nobody was dying of thirst.

Then the real fun started.  There was rock throwing.  And Edwin invented a new way to throw rocks: rock fireworks, when you throw a rock so hard it explodes into little pieces.  It's pretty fun to throw rocks when you're hiking because there isn't any other time when you're allowed to do that.

Next Sophia and Edwin tried their hands and rock climbing.  I commented to Brandon that we could have spent the morning paying to climb fake rocks indoors, but that we got to climb real rocks outside for free!  And, as a bonus, Brandon added, no ropes!

If it had been a sunny warm day we could have stayed much longer, but it started snowing so we had to head down.  And on the hike down, everyone was much happier.  

So now, of course, I am planning my next hiking Saturday.  After all, we're not going to live this close to the mountains in Tashkent, so I'd better get all of the fun in while I can.  My children are praying for lots and lots of snow, enough to keep us out of the mountains until May.

Safed Dara

Last Monday was a holiday, so we took the children up to Safed Dara, Tajikistan's best (and only) ski resort.  

Although Tajikistan gets plenty of snow in the mountains (it is a major source of water for a large part of Central Asia), the mountains themselves are actually pretty bad for skiing.  They are very steep and very rocky, which doesn't make for great runs.  Safed Dara is in a rare wide bowl and isn't very large.  You can see all the ski runs behind Eleanor in the picture above.  

I had no interest in taking the children skiing, so instead we went tubing.  Since skiing isn't a big sport here, the resort has wisely included other attractions - tubing, snowmobile rides, ice skating, a ropes course, a zip line, and pony rides.  

Normally we have a private sledding hill that we go sledding at, but it's been a very bad year for rain and snow here and there is no snow on the sledding hill.  The kids have been dying to go play in the snow, so I was glad that Safed Dara is a little over an hour out of town.

The resort has done a lot of improvements since it opened two years ago, and they have installed a gondola.  It had opened up a few more ski runs, but it also takes a lot of people up to the top just to look around.

The children (and Brandon), who had never been in a gondola before, enjoyed the ride.  Brandon felt a lot better when he saw that it was a German-made gondola.  It was, in fact, the best-constructed thing I've seen the whole three years we've been here.

But still Brandon made sure that everyone stayed seated and didn't rock the gondola.  It's always good to be safety-minded.

There was more snow at the top than at the bottom, and the children made good use of it.

William, who had been up all morning, took a nap while strapped to Brandon's front.

The older children found a nice steep snow bank and thoroughly enjoyed sliding down it.  One would have thought that they had had enough sliding, but if they were happy, I was happy.

Eleanor's legs were too short for climbing snow hills, so she sat around and made snowballs and threw them.

I joined her after awhile and the other children started throwing back when my aim improved enough to actually hit them.  We had a fun time until I got a little overexcited and whitewashed Edwin.  He was not happy.  I'm pretty sure we weren't friends for at least half an hour.

He's not happy in this picture.  But everyone else is, so the majority won.  Everyone had such a fun time (whitewashing excepted), that we might even go back one more time before we leave.  Hooray for fun things in Tajikistan!

Uzbek Circus

My phone rang Thursday afternoon while I was feeding children lunch (one of the least favorite parts of my day) and it was Brandon.  "Question for you," he asked, "Do you want to take the kids to the circus?"

Circuses are a lesser-known remnant of Soviet culture.  Every large city in the former Soviet Union has a dedicated circus building and they're still being used today.  There are various circus troupes that come and tour and when they come into town, there are enough people who like circuses to sell out performances.  

I had seen an email going around about the Uzbek circus being in town and had wanted to go, but I was too lazy to do anything about it.  There is no such thing as online ticketing here, so you have to go and buy the tickets on some other random day and we're halfway across the city (a ten minute drive!) from the circus.  So, when Brandon called, I was happy that he was randomly at the circus to buy tickets.  He had been out going to a meeting that was close to the circus and one of his colleagues had gone to buy tickets so he figured he might as well buy tickets, too.  

We went to the circus in Baku, so this time I knew what I was in for (no elephants, lots of acrobatics, and good seat pretty much anywhere in the house).  But it was also interesting to see what was different about the circus here.  Baku had lots of stilettos, flesh-colored leotards, bleached blonde hair, and sparkles.  The Uzbek circus was much more toned-down and less flashy, with nary a stiletto in sight.  The show was started out by the performers dancing to traditional music in traditional Uzbek costume (which looks pretty much exactly like traditional Tajik costume).  The women all had lovely long, dark hair and didn't show much skin past their shoulders.  The music was also a mix of booming loud club-style music with an occasional American song thrown in ("Cotton-Eyed Joe" bought me back to my teenager-hood).

But it was still an entertaining mix of acts.  We got to watch a lady doing tricks on a swinging rope, dog tricks, monkey tricks, pony tricks, and a llama (which didn't do any tricks).  There was a juggler, hula-hooper (which ended with a flaming hula hoop - always awesome), rope trick lady, whip-cracking man, and a tight rope walker.  He was pretty impressive - finishing his act by crossing the wire with two women sitting on his shoulder and one standing on his head.  We also enjoyed ladies swinging around on long sheets and men balancing ten-foot poles on their heads while women did handstands on top of the poles.  It was pretty awesome.

The children enjoyed the whole show (with the exception of William, who was not okay with having to sit on someone's lap for almost three hours - that's what we get for letting him sleep through church), along with all of the other children who had come for an afternoon of entertainment.  I won't be surprised if the children start getting a little more creative with their swing set and jungle gym, and I'm pretty sure Eleanor and Joseph will start going to the circus during their play time.  

I enjoyed it too, when I wasn't wrestling William.  I don't think watching people do amazing tricks ever can really get old.  It doesn't matter if you're watching it at the Cirque to Solei in Vegas, on YouTube videos, or in an old Soviet circus building surrounded by a thousand of your closest Tajik buddies.  A circus is still a circus.  And it's always a good show.

September, the Month of Disappointed Hopes

Right now it is eighty-nine degrees outside.  I forgot to water my plants this morning and my four o'clocks are draped over the sides of their pots, leaves hanging limply.  The children are playing on the third floor with both air conditioners going full blast so that the toy room is inhabitable.  Everyone will turn on the air conditioners at bed time tonight so they can sleep.  Yesterday we spent three hours at the pool and nobody got cold.

Yes, it is September in Dushanbe.

After my first long, hot summer in Dushanbe, I figured that we would find some relief in September.  After all, the first day of fall is in September, so one could reasonably expect something resembling cooler or at least cool-ish weather in September.  And there is cooler weather in September because ninety-degree weather is cooler than one hundred-degree weather.  But it isn't exactly the type of fall weather that one usually drinks hot chocolate to or starts making things like pumpkin bread (which will be happening here a lot this year as we use up our stores of canned pumpkin).

Every year I'm thrown by September.  I attended school long enough to associate September with Not Summer, the month where carefree summer days at the pool turned into long slogs of school, homework, and increasingly shorter afternoons.  All of my cute summer clothes would, after the first few weeks of school in August, be retired in favor of jeans and jackets and crisp fall mornings.

But here in Dushanbe we're still rocking summer, finally dipping into the upper eighties - temperatures that send countries like England into panic - halfway through September.  I haven't even thought of breaking out jeans in months (I think I wore some in April, maybe) and I'm pretty sure I'll be caught flat-footed when the children finally need shoes and somebody has grown out of theirs.

September is the month of stale summer, unwelcome summer, summer that has stayed just a little too long.  We were all happy to see summer back in May, when winter had bleached our skins paper-white and our diet had been reduced to mealy apples, stringy oranges, grainy greenhouse tomatoes, and soft potatoes for too many months to count.  Summer was welcome, the season of abundant fresh produce, endless sunshine, and flip flops - every mom's favorite shoes.  All of the flowers were in bloom, the swimsuits new, and trees full of bright, green leaves.

But summer has been here for months and everyone is ready to move on.  The children's swimsuits are bleached and faded from months' use.  The flowers are faded and dusty, plants tired of life.  I groan inwardly at yet another afternoon hauling the children to the pool because it's still too hot to take a simple walk down to the park.  A cup of hot chocolate is nice, in theory, but still oh so out of place.

But still September drags on, taunting us with shorter days, cooler nights, and slanting sunshine.  It looks like it should be fall, it feels like it should be fall, but still you broil every time you step out your front door at noon.

I feel that I am looking a gift horse in the mouth and know that I will kick myself for wanting a day more of cold when I am in the depths of February, months from anything resembling flip-flop weather.  I know that friends in places where September means the first frost are wanting to kick me right now.

But I suppose it is the nature of humans to never want too much of a good thing, and too much of a good thing is summer in September.

But it is not October yet, and so I will wait, holding my breath, with everyone else in Dushanbe for summer to finally die and fall to make its welcome appearance.  Until then, however, you can find me at the pool.

Final Lap

It is now September.  We have finally gotten over jet lag, unpacked all the suitcases, reassembled our life, and are now staring down the home stretch of our time in Dushanbe.

A week or two ago, Brandon got an email informing him that he was paneled to our next assignment in Tashkent.  This means that we are definitely going to be living in Tashkent in at most a year (if Brandon doesn't pass his language test and has to spend a few months in DC brushing up on his Russian).

It's strange to be looking ahead and see a definite end date to our time here in Dushanbe, a point where all of our stuff will be packed up, we'll be getting on an airplane, and saying a complete and final goodbye to Tajikistan.

If we had spent a normal two-year tour here, this would be the point where'd I'd start panicking and buy all the things, hike all the hikes, and go on all of the trips I thought that I'd have plenty of time for.  But, it turns out that Tajikistan really doesn't have much of that stuff anyway and we've already done it all.  Twice.

I'm happy that we're not moving until May.  This gives me a whole school year to slowly get things ready, let the baby grow up a little more, and finish everyone's school work before packing everything up and leaving.  I'm not anxiously awaiting our departure, counting down the months and weeks before I can get out of here.  Dushanbe has treated me pretty well (other than the sicknesses and traveling) and I haven't gone crazy from the cultural differences yet.  It helps that I spend 95% of my time not interacting with Tajikistan.

But also I'm not going to be sobbing big, sad tears when we leave either.  It turns out that when you move around from foreign country to foreign country, there is an element of perpetual long-term tourist to your life.  Every Saturday can be spent going out discovering new things and having new adventures.  Once I thought about the lives of people who spend twenty years in the same house and neighborhood and state and realized that they probably ran out of new things to do about eighteen years ago.

I'm definitely getting a taste of on this tour.  We haven't gone a new hike in over a year because we've just about hiked all the ones within an hour drive.  Brandon and I choose our date night restaurants based on which restaurant (the Chinese, Korean, Georgian, Latin American, Asian, Ukranian, Afghani, or Middle Eastern one) we've gone to least recently.  The children are beyond familiar with the embassy playground, and I can tell you exactly what the Hyatt has for their breakfast buffet.  If we lived in America, this might be 'cozy' or 'familiar,' but here in Dushanbe and in this life where I get to see the world, it's more like boring.  I'm ready for some new scenery.

The children are equally excited for some new scenery, Kathleen most excited of all because of the possibility of a pool at our next house.  Well, some of them.  Eleanor isn't very clear on the concept of moving because the last time she moved she was seven months old.  Edwin is just irritated at the thought of his Legos being unavailable for several months.

For right now, however, moving is still a distant dream, like the thought of summer break when you've just finished the first month of school.  It's definitely going to happen, but not for a good long time.  In between now and then are lots of good things to look forward to also, and so I won't get too antsy yet.  But not too comfortable either.

Living in Dushanbe - Summer

It is summer here in Dushanbe and we are deep into it.  It has been hot so long that the sensation of being cold or wearing pants or shoes or socks or jackets is a vague memory that resides in the same part of reality as the tooth fairy.  The high here a few days ago was 107 degrees.  One hundred and seven degrees is so hot that it is ten degrees hotter than ninety-seven degrees and twenty degrees hotter than eighty-seven degrees.  It's so hot that a few of my plants outside have to be watered twice a day or they will be dead by morning.  It's hot enough that the waterslide deck burned Sophia's feet pink the last time we went to the water park.  It's just hot.

There are some good things about summer in Dushanbe.  Summer is the time when there is all the produce in the world for cheap cheap cheap.  Right now you can go to the bazaar and get watermelons, yellow melons, peaches, nectarines, blackberries, apricots, cherries, apples, plums, raspberries, strawberries, and deliciously perfect tomatoes, in addition to all of the rest of the vegetables.  We spend all summer here in a fruit coma, packing in all of the fruit to last us through the winter.  Occasionally the children will ask if they can bring fruit outside while they are playing and I'll find two or three apricots rattling around in the bottom of a bowl that held two kilos that morning.  One of Eleanor's favorite things to do is sit and eat raspberries with a spoon, putting away at least a pound of them in one sitting.  I've told the children that one day when they grow up and live in America they will go to the grocery store and about die to see how much raspberries cost there and realize what they had while living in Dushanbe.

Normally the summer is also a great time for swimming.  The embassy has a pool and we have spent a lot of time there.  But it hasn't been working since the first day of summer (ironic, I know) and we've had to find alternatives.

Most days I send the children to play in the yard.  It's a scientific fact that children who spend all day in the house fight more than children who have been kicked out for a couple of hours.  At least it's a fact in our house.  We have a sprinkler (thanks, Dad!) and so the children will put on their swimsuits so that they can try and spray each other with it.  Sometimes they just use the hose.  And until I banned the practice for the sake of the umbrellas, they used umbrellas to keep the very cold hose water off themselves.  This option isn't the children's favorite way to deal with the heat, but I don't care.

There is also a local waterpark which actually isn't that bad.  It is also very popular and getting there close to opening time, especially on women and children day (no men allowed, including lifeguards), is a good idea.  A few weeks ago I went with a friend to swim in the afternoon and we showed up only to discover that the place was so full that they were only letting people in as patrons left.  As it was going to be a long time before ten left, we gave up and went back to the sprinkler.  The children were only pacified after we promised cookies and root beer.

Thankfully we're leaving for three and a half weeks to go back to America where it isn't quite so hot (and this is North Carolina!) and there are things like central AC.  In my mind, summer is over after we come back from R&R because that's when school starts.  But evidently Tajikistan didn't read my mind because summer is definitely not over in August - or September.  I always think of September as the month of disappointed expectations.  I spend the whole month waiting for the first breath of cool air, the promise of reasonable temperatures that mean we can start going outside again in something other than swimsuits.  But it never ever comes until October.  And then finally, summer is over.

I still like summer, even after spending three of them in Dushanbe.  I like wearing flip-flops and shorts and swimming and eating good produce.  I'd still rather be here than in Moscow.  But I will say that one day (and I'm not sure when that will be - I'm looking at you, Tashkent) when I live in a place where 100+ temperatures are an anomaly instead of a regularity, it will be a little nicer.  I'm not planning any moves to Canada, but I think I'm also going to stay away from Arizona too.  Maybe somewhere nicely in the middle.

In Which I Solve a Problem Entirely on My Own

Last week we ran out of water.  It was, as always, on laundry day.  We have four 500 liter water tanks in our utility space/room/closet/area and so theoretically we shouldn't run out of water.  Dushanbe usually has a pretty decent water supply (until they turn it off to work on pipes and then tell everyone on Tajik television but nobody bothers to tell us) that doesn't go out for days at a time and so we should be fine.  But it turns out that a household of eight people and all their showers, hand washing, toilet flushing, laundry washing, dish washing, and milk pasteurizing takes a lot of water.

I never know that we have run out of water until I turn on a faucet and nothing comes out.  It would be nice if we had some sort of low-water alarm or I even bothered to check the tanks on a frequent basis so I could know that we were getting low and institute water-saving measures.  But we don't and I don't so this means that I don't know we're out of water until it's... out.

The first few (ten or fifteen) times this happened, I would go and check the tanks and realize that it wasn't entirely out, just coming in at a very slow dribble that would never fill up all four of those tanks in any kind of speed that would let me finish washing my laundry before next week.  I just figured that the local water pressure had gotten low and waited around until it filled back up.

After this happened a few times, I got savvy, ordered another garden hose, and just stretched all three of my hoses (real hoses, with threads and everything.  I think I'm the only person in the entire country with a threaded garden hose, and only because I jury-rigged my Tajik hose so that I could put a real hose on it) through the yard, up the front stairs, through the front door, across my living room, through my storage/coat room, and into the mysterious concrete space where all four of my water tanks hide.  Then I just filled the tanks up from our yard water supply that was working just fine.  And then I was okay until the water got low again on laundry day.

Then the water meter on the outside water tap broke and we had no outside water for five months.

So I had to call Facilities Maintenance to come and fix my problem.

One of the great things about living in embassy-provided housing is that you never have to fix your own problems.  Lightbulbs need replacing?  Put in a work order!  Need to hang pictures?  Work order! Washing machine broken?  Put in that work order and they'll bring a new(ish) one the next day.  Your four year-old colored on all the walls with a Sharpie?  That's what work orders are for!

But one of the downsides about living in embassy-provided housing is that you can't fix your own problems.  We have had power issues since we moved into our house over two and a half years ago, and they still haven't been fixed.  One of our kitchen lights started smoking while we were eating dinner.  I put in a work order, the FM guy came when I was out, and insisted to Kathleen that there was no problem.  See?  No smoking lights right now!

So when the water is out, I have no choice but to call FM to come and fix it.  And until they come and fix it I don't have any water.  After this had happened for the thirtieth or fortieth time, Brandon made me sit and watch the entire process.  "Look," he told me, "it can't be that complicated.  They come, they do something, and ten minutes later you have water again.  Just watch and see what they do.  Then you can do it instead."

So I watched.  I watched as they fiddled with one part of the elaborate filter system that was installed last year and then updated a few months ago.  I kept watching as they fiddled with another part, removing things and washing the cake of dirt that had built up inside, and then watched as they backwashed the sand filter.  As the FM guy finished up, he turned to me.  "See," he shook his finger at me, "it is very difficult.  Very hard to do."  I nodded.  Sometimes it's easier to nod then argue.

Last Tuesday it happened again.  I came downstairs from school to find a trickle of water and not clean clothes where clean clothes should have been.  As always, the water coming into the tanks had slowed to a trickle.  I considered calling FM.  Then I considered pulling all of the hoses through the house and just filling it up and getting on with my day.  And then I put on my big girl pants and pulled out my wrench.

First stop was the incoming water pipe.  I turned off the water supply (very important!), wrenched open a side valve, and cleaned out the screen that had filled with miscellaneous gunk.  Then I put it all back together.  Next I moved on to the first filter bolted to the wall.  I managed to wrench the plastic wring holding a clear plastic cup assembly up to the water supply, but was stymied when the cup itself would not come off.  I wriggled and pulled, but it would not budge.  I had visions of pulling everything off the wall and THEN having to call FM and explained how I had ruined their elaborate set up.  I backwashed the sand filter to release the water pressure, but it still stuck fast.  As a last attempt, I got a butter knife (a very useful tool) and managed to break the seal.  The whole thing came off.  I washed out the screen in the yard, scrubbing as much silt as possible off.

I came back inside, put everything back together, and turned the water on.  Still a trickle.  So I moved to the next filter assembly, two large blue cylinders further on in the system.  Once again I wrenched and wrestled but this one would not come off.  I wrenched some more to visions of ruining the system again and it still wouldn't budge.  One more time I attacked it and finally, with a flood of muddy water, it came off.  And was empty.

Some time ago, I had noticed what looked like a big roll of paper towels next to the tall blue filter cylinders.  After a long while I realized it was a filter core.  Then after another while, I noticed a second filter core.  Evidently last time the water stopped, somebody got the bright idea of just yanking the core instead of replacing it.  It's just a little silt after all, right?

So I moved on to the next filter, yanking this one off a little more easily, and found a filter core inside plugged up with mud.  It turns out that water in Dushanbe is really silty.  The mud in this filter had made it through two other filters before being stuck in this one.  I looked at the back-up core, looked up at the muddy one, decided that the back-up one looked cleaner, and plopped it in.  Then everything got screwed together, the water turned on, and the system charged.  I waited a minute or two and then, miracle of miracles, water came gushing into my big, white, plastic water tanks.

Then I did a happy dance and told myself how awesome I was.  I had fixed a problem entirely on my own without anybody helping me.  I told the children how awesome I was and they were kind of impressed, but not really.  After all, mom's job is to fix problems, right?  So I called Brandon and told him what an amazing wife he has.  He said that yes, I truly am amazing, and thanks for fixing the problem.  I hung up and gave myself a few high-fives and watched the water run into the tanks at a breathtaking speed.  I felt the sense of accomplishment that comes from overcoming impossible odds.  I did another dance and told the children (again) that their mom is pretty cool while listening to my imaginary theme song playing to crowds cheering.  I did a few fist pumps.

And then, I went back to doing laundry.