Katy, Drew and I in the front. Alex, our best friend, is standing behind me, then next to him in the middle is Sasha, the dog tamer, and then Cola, his best friend.
water. you turn on a faucet and clean drinkable water pours out.
a normal chore for us was taking turns filling the water bottles. This entailed using a filter that we brought from the states to make the water there drinkable. It was hooked up to the faucet, but of course the attachment was American made, not necessarily universal so water would squirt out the sides of the faucet in a dazzling display of inefficiency. Yelling ensued when a careless family manner knocked it off! It was really hard to attach. The water then went through a filtering system and then came out of another faucet, the kind that looks like a tiny water spigot in nice homes that have filtered water as another option at their sink. You know, classy like. Ours wasn’t classy like, but it got the job done. We took turns filling 1 liter bottles and trying not to get distracted because water would then pour all over the counter and floor. There wasn’t an off button and even if you turned off the faucet at the sink, the water from the filter would continue to pour out.
We’d usually do at least a couple dozen bottles at a time to make it worth it, but my memories include doing what I perceived as endless amounts of empty plastic bottles with the orange Fanta and Coke labels peeling off. We kept them on the floor and near our fridge that was the size of one of those wine fridges. Yes, we held all of the food we ate in a fridge the size of what people keep their expensive booze in!
As frustrating as getting drinkable water was, what was worse was when we didn’t have water. Yeah, NO water. Occasionally water would just shut off. When it did come on, we’d freak out and fill the bathtub full. Which, of course, meant then that no one got showers. And it also meant that we couldn’t filter the water, we had to boil it, then try to pour it from our pot into the liter bottles which wasn’t easy! We got used to being smelly. Now, let me say that this is a city of several million and we lived in high rises, not huts. Water trucks would come around, looking like the kind of machines that cleaned streets here, or maybe they were. There would be a general cry and everyone would run to get bottles, buckets, small wash tubs… anything that would hold water! we would run as as one towards the life-giving truck and push and fight forward to get some. A lot of times the truck would start moving again before everyone had got what they needed. Survival of the fittest. I was fit. I took on responsibility for my family’s survival that I had no business taking on.
Worse yet were the times when the water truck didn’t come around. Then we’d load up anything that held water and walk the quarter or half a mile to the trolley-bus station and take it up several stops, change lines then continue on to the stop that had some natural springs. I remember making such a watery mess on the trolley-buses on the way home, but no one minded, they were doing the same thing. Also, realize that we also had to flush toilets with this precious water… and wash dishes…
My own personal favorite was walking to a spring that was near our flat. When I say near, that is very relative. We were friends with a lot of the kids and they would go there for water frequently. We followed them past our apartments and into the woods. Our part of the city, Alekseevskaya, was on the outskirts of the city and many people had dachas, or small family farms, where they would grow a lot of the food that they would eat. So we would walk to the springs that was a ways away on foot on an unpaved path with bottles and bags that could hold them better. A benefit of being a teenage girl there was that the somewhat chauvinistic but still gentlemen like boys would always offer to help me carry the water where ever we were. I remember lugging a bucket of water back to my flat and my hands hurt so bad! I started thinking of Laura Ingalls Wilder and drawing my strength from the fact that if she could do it I could too! (Also, I didn’t have to do this every day!)
I remember when we returned to the states, about a year and a half there, being awake in the middle of the nights because of jet lag, and going into the kitchen where we were staying. The kitchen was dark except for light shining in from a street lamp. I got a cup and turned on the water and let it flow over the edges, and cried and cried.