We waited until around 10 o'clock in the morning for it to be a socially acceptable time to call a family's telephone. Then we called our Armenian tutor, Karine. The thing you should know about Karine is that she's awesome. She helps us out with so much, we ere confident that she would know what to do about our situation- and she did not disappoint. Immediately, she offered to have her son run over to our house with jugs of water. Once we assured her that we had plenty of bottled water and that nothing that drastic was necessary, she told us she would make some calls and find us a plumber.
While we waited for Karine to call us back with word on the plumber, the Great Waterless Food Prep project continued. We care carefully used as few dishes and cooking implements as possible, rinsing utensils off only when strictly necessary, using as little of our store-bought water supply as possible. It was much easier for me than it was for Sam. All my dishes were vegetable based, and had complementary flavors. Who cares is there's a small piece of apple baked into the pumpkin bread or if some extra pumpkin pie spice finds its way into the apple crisp?
Sam, on the other hand, had ot make both chicken stock and sweet Italian sausage from scratch for the stuffing (talk about food poisoning risk...) and then hat to shop up both onion and garlic for the glazed carrots. And you really don't want those strong allium flavors- to say nothing of the potential bacterial contaminants- to get on your other food or dishes. At one point, Sam was mixing sausage meat with one hand, adding spices to the meat with the other, and then using his 'clean' hand to scrape the sticking meat off the 'dirty' hand, with a spoon before rinsing the 'dirty' hand briefly in clean water and doing a final sterilization with some alcogel (hand sanitizer gel) that we thankfully had left over from our sketchy school bathroom days back in Shahumyan.
Karine called us back about two hours later with an update. The plumber she knew and would normally have called was in Yerevan, and thus unavailable. She had spent some time on the phone with various friends, family members, and neighbors trying to find a second plumber who might be in town. Eventually, she got a name, but the referring party didn't know the potential plumber's phone number. They did, however, know the neighborhood where this potential plumber lived- and this is where the story gets super hayavari (translation: traditionally or stereotypically Armenian)
Karine collected this information and called her brother, Karen. (This naming pattern is analogous to the English Robert and Roberta.) She had Karen drive over to the plumber's neighborhood, and just ask random people on the street if they knew this guy's phone number, until he got an affirmative answer and the number. Having accomplished this, Karen called the plumber and explained our situation to him. The plumber said that he'd be happy to help, but that he was working on a job in the next town over, and since he didn't have a car, he had no way of getting to our house that day. Apparently, the solution to this problem was that Karen would drive to the next town over, pick up the plumber (who was still in the middle of the job that he was working on when Karen had called), and drive him over to our house. At least, that's what happened.
After a few minutes of poking around, the plumber informed us that a few 3/4" thick pipes which were completely exposed, uninsulated, and fixed to the exterior wall of our house (and which I had- up until now- assumed were gas pipes because if they were water pipes they'd clearly freeze...) were, in fact, our water pipes, and were indeed frozen solid. He suggested that the best thing to do would be to tear them all out and replace them with new pipes rather than trying to thaw them. He estimated this would cost about 3,000 dram in materials, plus labor. (The total cost at the end of the day was about 7,000 dram, or about $15 US, making this the cheapest plumber visit Sam and I will ever have in our entire lives).
"Does that plan sound good?" he asked us.
"Yeah-" we replied, "what else would we do?"
"Well," the plumber gestured to our uninsulated frozen water pipes, "You can call your landlord and tell him that he's to blame for this, that this is terrible, and that he needs to pay to have it fixed..."
Feeling vindicated, we smiled. "You're right, we agree, by we're not telling our landlord anything." we said.
So Karen drove the plumber back to his job in the neighboring town, he finished up there, and then used that money to buy the pipes for our house. Karen stayed with him all afternoon, and drove him and the new pipes back to our place at around half-past three. By 4 o'clock, we had running water again.
It just so happened that the first batch of apple crisp was just finishing up in the oven at the same time the plumber finished up his work on our house. I boxed up a few servings for both Karen and the plumber and just before they left explained to that that this day was an important holiday in America, one in which we celebrate all the things we're thankful for- and eat lots of food. I thanked both men, telling them how grateful we were for their help, and I explained that the food I was giving them was traditional American food for this holiday. They seemed to follow along with my broken and stumbling Armenian, and I felt like I had done well with my impromptu Thanksgiving explanation. The men left together in Karen's car with smiles and waves.
Unfortunately, the work was far from over for us. The next several hours passed in a blur as we frantically worked to finish all that there was left to do. Having running water was a godsend, since at that point in the day we had used and made dirty just about every dish and implement in the house. Somehow, we got it all done, and by 7 o'clock all of the food was ready to eat, packed safe and warm in a hamper. Our friend Davit came and helped Sam carry the hamper down the hill to the Basen. There, we met Kate and her host family, Arus, Tyler, Meline, and their parents, Karine (who was definitely our hero for the day) and her sons, as well as our Sisian host family members Hasmik, Sona, and Basentsi.
Other friends from around Sisian drifted in and outover the course of the evening and the American food was a near universal success (Kate's hostmom refused to try most of it because when it comes to trying new food, some Armenians have the tolerance of a 7-year-old picky eater). Karine even asked me for the recipe to the pumpkin bread- which is a real compliment around these parts.
The dinner itself was filled with toasts. It seems like everyone made at least one speech. For myself, I toasted our friends in Sisian, without whom we could not be happy, healthy and whole members of the community. And for a moment I was able to forget the challenges I've been struggling with here, as my heart filled with gratitude for these people who have made room in their lives for the weird and socially awkward Americans. It was the perfect way to truly celebrate Thanksgiving.
At the end of the evening, we were driven home by Vagho- the young man who works as the Basen- with full stomachs and sleepy (read: 'slightly tipsy') heads. We spent the next day recovering and washing almost all the dishes in our house, before we got to repeat the experience again with the PCVs in the area.
It has been a mentally and physically exhausting week, but I think this will always remain one of the best Thanksgivings I've ever had...
