Further Adventures in Armenian Plumbing Pt 3

Okay- so, we've got some real information regarding our water problem. Today, the guys from the water department brought out a great big digger and tore up the street to figure out what was going on down there. Turns out that the water main is about 2 meters deep, and the cuff which connects the main pipe to the pipe which services our house is broken. The guy from the water department told Sam that we had to buy the replacement part, and had him get into his car and drove off- presumably to get the replacement cuff.

As I write this, we now know that replacing the cuff definitely isn't our responsibility. We've had a chance to ask a few Armenians- both Sisiansis and PC staff- and they tell us that anything broken after the Jrachap (water meter) to our house is our responsibility to fix, but that anything before the meter is the responsibility of the water department. We were pretty sure that this was the case when the guy told Sam he had to buy a replacement part, but we figured that just coughing up the money for the part may be the fastest way to get the water fixed, so- as long as it wasn't crazy expensive- we'd just go along with it. 

However, it turns out that there was no replacement part in Sisian. Sam rode around town for a few hours with the guy- and as he did, it became increasingly clear that the guy had known from the start that there was no replacement part in Sisian. We're still wondering why he had Sam drive around town with him in the first place... but eventually they drove back to our house, at which point the man told us that we'd have to go get the part from Yerevan. This was just too much. Forget the fact that we're literally the least qualified people in town to travel to Yerevan, locate a store with the necessary part, and describe the the people there which part we want- there's just no way that the water department is going to unload that much work on us. Sam told the guy that we weren't bringing him anything from Yerevan, and went back inside the house. We were done negotiating with this guy for the day. 

With nothing to be done until the part arrives from Yerevan, they turned the water main back on again so that our neighbors will all have water, and we watched as the pit around our pipe slowly began to flood. The bright point in all this is that our neighbor who is a police man says that once they get the part, it's only a few hours of work to replace the thing, so in a few days it should be sorted out.