Water Treatment

I selected assorted pictures that I thought were interesting. One of my favorite pictures is of the grandmother dancing at the wedding. The variety of dress and ages are demonstrated in the women dancing at a wedding. The little boy and the cow needs no explanation, but just to say I took this picture while getting fresh air at a wedding. The children at Linda’s Last Bell ceremony are dressed in the very best, and can you tell what the children in yellow and blue are doing? Answer – the Chicken Dance! I guess the Chicken Dance is popular throughout the world.

The rest of this blog has to do with our daily schedules. During the school year Linda taught 4 days each week with Monday as an off day. During Linda’s off day she did lesson preparations, cleaned, and all the household chores. On Wednesday’s and Friday’s Linda had Conversation Clubs and worked through lunch.
Now it is the summer and school will resume in September. Linda still has 2 conversation clubs. She combined her 8th and 9th graders into 1 club and then began another club for 5th and 6th graders. She has begun a Conversation Club for adults on Thursday evenings. Participants are adults wanting to improve their speaking skills. There is an engineer, a power plant worker, library staff, retired English teacher, an unemployed college graduate, a businessman who works with TIENS (a Chinese health products company which operates like Amway with distributors), and she hopes more in the future. It will be an interesting group. If it is beneficial she may continue something like it in the fall.
Denney goes to the library Monday – Friday from 09:30 – 12:30 and 2:30 – 5:30. Denney does Conversation Clubs, meets people, and helps where he can with the computers.
When we are in Baku with the Peace Corps business it requires 4-5 hours travel each way. The Peace Corps allows us a travel day to Baku, then our Peace Corps business, and a travel day back to Shirvan. It is when we are in Baku that Linda gets her haircut. We can go to Baku for personal business, but usually make it in one day, starting out early, returning that evening. The travel is by van to Baku, and then a Baku city line bus to the areas of the city. We have also begun to use the Metro (subway). The Metro is very cheap – 5 cents a ride, fast, crowded, and requires paying close attention to the stops.
We recently had our first overnight guests, our dear friends and co-volunteers, Bill and Dorothy Colcord. They serve in Barda. They are also retired and from Boston, MA. Bill and Dorothy have very good water in Barda, and he suggested I write about how we handle the water situation here.
On water days, Denney’s first hour after awaking is spent refilling a 30-gallon plastic trashcan. The trashcan is the holding unit and the silt settles. The water is then drawn off the top and placed into buckets for flushing and personal washing. The sink has a small half-bucket like metal container with a spicket for washing hands on non-water days. On water days, we use the faucet in the tub. There are 2 plastic buckets with lids in the kitchen. Denney pours the water slowly into a 5-gallon bucket with spicket that sits on a non-working burner of the stove with the spicket over the sink for water on non-water days. The water in the 2 plastic buckets is then poured slowly into the big bucket and only the settled water is used. The plastic buckets are rinsed so that a layer of silt is removed, and then refilled for settling.
Then Denney tackles the drinking water. Two pots are filled and boiled before the water is transferred to our water filters, then refilled and boiled and added as needed to the water filters. Each water filter unit holds about 2 gallons of water. We use only boiled and filtered water for cooking, drinking, and brushing our teeth. Hopefully at the end of a water day, the filters are full, and we have 4 liters of plastic bottles filled and in the fridge, along with a reserve 12 liter plastic bottle in the kitchen for emergencies. All that water is boiled and filtered.
On water-days Linda takes at least a half-day doing the laundry. First, hot water is needed to dissolve the powder detergent, and clothes are soaked. Later settled water is used to rinse. All wash and rinse water is used for flushing the toilet after the clothes are connected to the solar clothes dryer outside our balcony window. Linda must use a plastic washtub placed in the bathtub and leans over kneeling on the tile floor. Our thanks to Frank Saunders who sent Linda kneepads, which have made the laundry not nearly as painful for Linda.
When washing dishes on water-days, hot water comes from our heater, dishes are rinsed in tap water, but on non-water days, water is heated and rinsed in settled water from the big bucket. All used dishwashing water goes to flushing because the detergents give a better fragrance.
Flushing is accomplished by pouring a gallon or so of water into the bowl and it works most of the time.
I left out all the time for food preparation and hours for shopping.
We feel like we work few hours as compared to the United States, but it takes many more hours to accomplish the daily tasks. Also, we are Volunteers and retired in the U.S. An issue we face is fatigue. As we analyzed it, don’t tell anyone, but we are 60 years old, and every time we go out the door, we are on – that is aware of people watching us. Always responding to every “hello” from a child or adult. Always aware of our behavior, thinking about every thing we do outside our apartment is an emotional drain that is difficult to explain.
Finally, the weekend, and Linda scrubs and dusts the entire apartment even more thoroughly than during the week. Often she gets on her knees and washes the floors with bleach water as well as scrubbing the bathroom down with bleach water. It is a constant battle against the dust. We walk the parks, greet people, visit and talk, sometimes watch a DVD on the computer, and listen to music.
That’s our schedule in a nutshell.