A Word on Water and Washing

As my facebook status this morning I posted that I had had a dream wherein I took a shower, and it was wonderful.

Suffice it to say, I miss proper showers.  

I think I’ve mentioned here and there a little bit about my house/plumbing situation before, but I’m going to go ahead and go into a little more detail for you. Just for fun.

First of all, I am lucky enough to have running water in my house. Granted, it’s always cold and not always reliable, but it’s there. Basically how it works is that we have a well out in the yard, and once a week my babushka takes out this long hose and connects it to the well somehow (I’ve never actually seen her do it, so I’m not positive) and strings it in through the hallway down to the little bathroom where there is a big tub. She attaches a little strainer to the end of the house to filter out rocks and dirt that comes through with the water.  Once the tub is filled up, she puts the hose into a big basin located in a closet at the end of the hallway and fills that up. This basin is connected to a generator and is how we have “running water” to the toilet, a sink next to the tub, and a sink in the kitchen.

Can you guess what's behind this door?

(A little history lesson – there used to be “government” water in our house, and all the houses, but when the Russians ransacked the village and left at the fall of the Soviet Union they took the running water with them! My babushka was proactive and got this system set up with the help of her sons, but, in her own words “most homeowners are too lazy to do this, so they just live like aborigines and have to go to the well every day and only use toilets outside.”)

Here are the problems with the generator/basin set up:

• The water freezes in the Winter time
• Electricity often goes out (more so  in the Summer time)
• Sometimes the generator just randomly stops working, so we have to wait until my babushka’s son can come over and fix it. Sometimes that’s a couple of days.

Furthermore, sometimes we can’t use the water because the pipes are bad and get clogged up. This has been a big problem recently because we actually live in a duplex, and the old man on the other side of the house doesn’t care to clean out his pipes – which our connected to ours – and therefore we can’t use water too heavily.

So, what do I do when the water isn’t working or when the pipes are backed up?

OUTHOUSE!

Our outhouse in Ecik

My host family down south only had an outdoor toilet – and it was nothing more than a hole in the ground. Up here though, we’ve actually got a toilet seat… though you’ll never find any evidence of me having touched it ((shudder)), which is actually quite a feat considering the fact that it’s old and falling apart and actually slants backwards at an awkward angle. But, nonetheless, I have mastered it. Enough said.

The trek from the outhouse to the house

The red arrow is where the outhouse is (about 50 yards behind the white green house). The yellow arrow is the banya, and the purple arrow is our fantastic dog Greta.

And what about showering/bathing? Well…. Since I arrived in Kazakhstan in August of 2009 I have had nothing but a banya in which to clean myself. And… We banya only once a week. The rest of the week I just ignore my own stench and hope that no one else notices. Actually, I use baby wipes, as well as a soap-and-water wipe down over the sink after working out each evening. I also wash my hair by leaning over a bucket and scooping out the water from the tub. Yeah, the water that had to be filtered from dirt and rocks. Whatever.

So now you want to know how the banya works, right? Good, because I’m going to tell you.

In short, a banya is a little sauna, or steam room, that you also wash in. So, typically a banya has an outer room in which you undress before going in, and dry off and dress before leaving. When you’ve undressed and gathered your heavy duty cleaning supplies, you head into the actual wash/steam room. There is a big basin of water connected to a stove (ours is coal/wood/trash burning, but I’ve seen electric ones, too) that heats the water and the entire room. You can pour water on the top of it to create more steam. Next to the basin of hot water is a basin of cold water. Then you have buckets, and a scooper.  

You take a scoop of cold water and put it in the bucket, and then add however much hot water you need to get a comfortable temperature – give it a good swirl to mix the hot and cold evenly. Then… start washing!

Short ceilings! Watch out! (especially for the light fixture. It's HOT) I can stand up straight in this one, though - unlike our banya in Ecik.

The other “fun” little thing in the banya is the birch branches (you'll notice ours in the white bucket on the bench). You take this bundle of branches, get them nice and hot, and proceed to beat yourself with them – unless your banya-ing with someone else, in which case they will beat you. Sounds a little funny, I know, but it’s actually quite nice and relaxing when someone else does it to you – like a massage. I would recommend it. :)

So that’s it! That’s what I’ve been doing here once a week for the last (almost) two years! I actually quite like the idea of the banya. I only wish that I could shower, too.   

I should note that while a lot of volunteers live in apartments with showers, or nicer houses with showers (if I remember correctly, I was the only one in my training group in Ecik that did not have a shower. I felt sooo disgusting knowing that all the other volunteers were washing more than once a week!), even those are not showers like we would have in America. There is a tub and a faucet – shower curtains are kind of rare – but the shower head often is not set up high on the wall. Rather, it’s one of those shower heads with the hose and it just rests on the faucet. The idea is that you can sit in the tub while washing. Eh… not really my thing. Also, even if you have a shower, you’re not expected to shower on a daily basis. Two or three times a week is enough (for Americans. Locals on the other hand… they seem to be ok with once a week even when they have a shower).

Pretty fun, right!? Now you all want to take a trip to a Kazakhstan village, right!? As they say in awkwardly translated English, “You are welcome!”