Ramadan Day 11

My own husband doesn't know what day of Ramadan it is. He's confused. He believes it's day 10. I think he's severely dehydrated and it's effecting his brain. I on the other hand know, that I'm now in day 11 of my Ramadan experience. Surprisingly, I'm doing well today. Last night was interesting, as we prepared dinner, then tackled the laundry. All that extra energy felt good enough to make me actually wash clothes.

Now, I should explain for those of you who don't live in Azerbaijan, that washing clothes here is a very time consuming, and energy using event. You see, we don't have a washing machine. Our washing machine is a large plastic bucket. So after heating water for a shower, we decided that we could wash clothes for camp. The actual washing for 2 pairs of jeans, 1 pair of khakis, and 4 shirts took about an hour. You have the soaping, rinsing, squeezing, rinsing, squeezing and about 5 more rinsing squeezing cycles. By the time you're done, your hands sometimes callous, and for beginners, sometimes crack from all the water and soap that dries out your hands. Then, comes the "easy" part. Hanging the clothes to dry. I'm sure you're wondering what is so difficult about this. For most volunteers, this really is the easy part. But for me, I have some sort of bad luck. I live on the third floor of an old soviet style block apartment building. We have a corridor out front of our door, and it has an open wall to hang our clothes on the line. It's like a balcony where everything is concrete. Usually, I don't hang my clothes on the line on the outside, because the neighbor above likes to throw her trash off the balcony. Meaning, our clothes get covered in garbage after being washed. This has happened twice before. Instead, I hang my clothes to dry on the rope between my neighbors water tank, and our water tank. This has been fine all summer. However, last night, after putting all that hard work into washing the clothes, hanging them out to dry, and finally climbing in to bed after 11pm... I heard the tell tale sound of a wet "thwack." In an instant, my heart sank. I knew that sound... it had happened only once before. The line broke. With dread, we got up, put on full clothes, opened the front door, and turned on the porch light. Sure enough, there were our freshly washed clothes, laying on the dirty floor of the corridor. It took a lot of patience not to scream and yell, and jump up and down like a 5 year old who is angry. Instead, we gathered up the clothes that had fallen on the ground, re-hung the others that were still dangling mid-air on the broken lines, and went inside to re-wash the clothes. We don't have very many clothes here, and Farid in particular only has a total of 4 pairs of pants. So when his khakis fell in the dirt, I was determined to get them clean again. We re-washed the items, and this time hung them to dry inside the bathroom. It was late by the time we crawled tired back into bed. It was a rough night, as the wind howled most of the night through our neighborhood, waking us up frequently between the early hours and the time we had to wake up. We even had to close the windows regardless of the sweltering heat, for fear the curtains would rip away from the rod on the wall.

430 came early, and I stumbled out of bed to light the gas to heat our tea-pot. It takes about 7 minutes for the water to boil. Everything else was ready, so all we had to do was wait. We lay down, and for a moment closed our eyes. I jolted awake 20 minutes later. It's a good thing that we had almost an hour between 430 and sunrise, or else we would have been extra hungry today. Most of the water had boiled out of the pot, and we both sleepily sat down to breakfast at the table. As soon as we were done, it was back to bed for our sleepy brains.

Then, at 815 we woke up for work... which we gave ourselves 15 minutes to get ready for. Can you tell how tired we must have been? After throwing on clothes, and brushing our hair, we left for work, checking on the clothes outside on the line. Immediately, Farid and I noticed "gaps" in the line. We both thought, "Oh no, our clothes had been whipped away down two stories into the trees and chicken yard below!" We spent a few minutes trying to see where they had landed... nothing from our floor could be seen. So we went down to the second, then the first, and finally to the ground floor to look around in the trees and garbage strewn field behind our building. We couldn't find them. I was so upset that I was devising plans to go to the bazar and buy Farid a new pair of pants. We had to go to work though, so we got on the bus. Half way to work, we remembered that those gaps in the line were not the khakis and shirts that had fallen in the dirt... we had re-hung those in the bathroom. I felt silly, and a bit embarrassed for looking around in the chicken yard behind our building. I believe we are truly tired today.