It's official: the man from the Jgmugh is in Yerevan, purchasing the replacement part to fix our water. Hopes are high that I'll be able to take a shower for my birthday on Saturday. In the mean time, this entire episode has made me really think about the state of infrastructure in Armenia, and the impact that has on the people living here. It seems to me that our bathroom is a perfect microcosm of the challenges facing the Armenian people. The #ThrowbackThursday challenge on the Peace Corps subreddit this week was images from 'your Posh Corps experience'. I submitted the following photo and short explanation which captures my thoughts on the matter pretty well:
"So, this picture of my bathroom perfectly sums up my Posh Corps experience, and provides a really great microcosm for understanding one of the major challenges experienced my the people in my country of service.
In this image, you see a bright, modern-looking bathroom- completely tiled, with a french shower head, bathtub, sink, and the piece de resistance: a western-style toilet. Very posh-corps, right? No pooping in a hole for me.
Unfortunately, you've got about a 50/50 chance of any of those things working, and sometimes the plumbing is on the fritz for prolonged periods of time. Hence, the make-shift urine diverting dry toilet (that's the pot and the DIY lady-friendly urinal you see between the toilet and the tub), and the camelbak hanging from the shower head for washing faces and brushing teeth (Sam and I invest in sani-wipes or alcohol-based hand sanitizer in the capital rather than pinching the camelbak mouthpiece to wash hands)...
We could theoretically take bucket baths in the tub, but the fact that some times houses have running water means there's no town well where we can draw up water when the municipal plumbing shuts down. Similarly, we have to crap into a pot on our bathroom floor because the existence of modern plumbing means the house isn't equipped with an outhouse. (And trust me- having done both, crapping on your bathroom floor is somehow waaay more psychologically disturbing that pooping in a hole... I don't know why, it just is)
On a nation-wide scale, the existence of modern-style infrastructure has eroded the social and logistical systems which were previously in place to handle these kinds of day-to-day needs. However, the conditions of economic hardship with which Armenia has struggled since the collapse of the Soviet Union has resulted in crumbling, unreliable infrastructure, causing problems which wouldn't exist if locally sustainable technologies and systems were extant in our community.
And that, my friends, is my Posh Corps experienced summed up in one photograph."
No comments:
Post a Comment