Further Adventures In Armenian Plumbing Pt Forever

Ok- I don't even know how to begin picking up this tale... where did we leave off? If you'll recall, we woke up the morning of January 5th to find that we had no running water in our house. Further investigation (over the course of several days) lead us to discover that there was a problem with the cuff which connected our house's water supply to the water main. Fortunately, since the problem was "upstream" of the water meter, this meant that it was the Jrmugh's (the Water Department's) responsibility to fix it. Over the past 3 weeks, in comedy-of-errors style series of events, that hasn't happened. First, there was no suitable replacement cuff in Sisian, so I guy had to go get it in Yerevan. About a week later, they finally got the piece from Yerevan, but it was the wrong size. Then there were no pieces the correct size in Armenia, and so the correct size had to be ordered from Russia. Then, they finally had the right piece and it was the right size, but nobody had thought to bring back from Yerevan the literal nuts and bolts to install it. For a while, we wondered if we were supposed to bribe someone- and if we had known how much and to whom, we may have done it-but it looks like no bribe was necessary, since yesterday they finally fixed the problem and replaced the broken cuff.

We were super excited about this, however, that excitement quickly faded when we learned that we still didn't have any running water. we checked all the places we learned about over Thanksgiving, but heating them up didn't seem to have any effect. With Karine's help, we got a plumber out to our house towards the end of the day yesterday, and his only advice was to dig out the pipe, poking holes in it every few meters, until we found a spot which had water pressure. This was most definitely not the answer we wanted, but at least it gave us a game plan.

And so here we are today:

We've spent the entire morning digging the pipe out of frozen ground- which is no easy feat when all you've got to work with is a shovel and a large piece of iron bar. What we really need is a pick ax, but I don't see us acquiring one any time in the near future. 

We've got a system of several extension cords and electric heaters set up so that when we go in for lunch we can try to warm up the area around the pipe where we're digging. I know, I know, it's a wild fire waiting to happen and Smokey the Bear would be horribly upset with us, but Smokey hasn't had to deal with a month without running water in the middle of an Armenian winter, so he can take his disapproval and stick it where the sun don't shine.