Waking up the sleeping land: First blog for 2012

It's the 16th of January today. I left off the end of last year on a tired note. The New Year started with Melody and I standing on our balcony drinking champagne and watching fire works coming from various parts of Akademgorodok. We followed this up with the customary telephone calls to all our friends to wish them a safe, happy and love filled New Year.

It's slow getting through winter. At the start of November the sun is still at a 19 degree arc in the sky. It then drops off rapidly to be at 11 degrees above the horizon on December 10th. After dipping to 10.6 from December 17th to the 30th (yes the solstice is actually more of a season than a singular day), it only climbs past 11 to 12 degrees by January 9th. I have therefore determined that December 10th to January 9th is the hardest part of the year for me to get through, when the day starts at 10:15 am and gets dark at 5:15 pm.

Thankfully, the sun is now starting to slowly climb in the sky. Today got light at 10:08 am. By February 21st it will reach 23.5 degrees and "Spring of Light" will have started. There will still be snow on the ground but it will glisten in the sun!

In our first week of January we visited our friends Rustam and Lena in a village called Osinovi Miys. It's about 600 km from Krasnoyarsk, first traveling east and then north. We took an over night train to get there. Rustam and Lena and their kids lived here in Krasnoyarsk for most of the first year that we were i this city. We made good friends with them in that time. They have now been living in the village for three years. This was the first time we have visited them there.

I am happy to say that they do have an indoor toilet. This alone makes a stay in the village so much more pleasant. They sort of have indoor plumbing. Twice a week a truck delivers water to their house, which is stored in a tank. They use this water for their needs. Water is only used to flush the toilet that has first gone through the washing machine.

We had a quiet and relaxing time at their house. We played games. I got to play the piano every day. (Not something that happens regularly in my life these days.) We talked a lot.

Rustam is now in our flat for a couple weeks, while he does some professional development for his teaching job here in Krasnoyarsk. A story started to develop while we were in the village that is further unfolding now. It has nothing to do with me personally, but it has stuck in my mind.

A neighbour from down the road drove Rustam to the train station to meet us, when we arrived at 6:30 in the morning. Their village is about 70kms from the train line. The car was relatively new and a little small. The driver drove quickly as most Russians do. There were very few cars on the road. It did occur to me that Russians so often have to replace their shock absorbers on their cars. People complain about bad roads being the cause. This is only partly true. Our driver took many of the bumps on the road at full speed. I remarked to myself that his shock absorbers would last far less this way, not to mention the other damage it was doing to his car.

The night before we went home a helicopter flew over Rustam and Lena's house. I thought nothing of it. Lena ran outside to see it, surprised, because there was no such flight scheduled. The next day we rang the same driver to ask if he could take us back to the train station in the evening. His wife answered Rustam with tears. Her husband had been badly injured the night before while working in the forest. He is a logger. Logging continues 24 hours a day through out the winter. Winter is considered to be the better time of the year to get the work done.

Sadly, many, many people in Russia are plagued by alcoholism. Rustam gave me his educated guess of what happened. A tree had been partially cut. Another man (not our taxi driver) was driving a truck that ran into the tree. This accident sent the tree falling unexpectedly. The tree fell on our taxi driver. The driver of the truck was almost certainly drunk. What kind of accusation is this? So often workers will operate machinery while drinking. Rustam remembers a time he was picked up by a truck driver while hitching a ride. The driver had a bottle of vodka between his legs while he drove, that he took swigs from.

The craziness of the story does not end there. The injured man Sergei was taken by helicopter to the nearest hospital. Five days he was still lying in the hospital waiting to see a doctor. The hospital's only doctor was on holiday. (The period after New Year is a holiday for everyone.) So he had not got back to work yet. Sergei was injured badly and could easily have died while waiting to see the doctor.

The latest I have heard in that story is that Sergei was driven to Krasnoyarsk by a friend in a private car, because he could not afford official transportation. He is now being treated in a city hospital, very blessed to still be alive.

Just hearing other people's stories can be scary sometimes. The morning of New Year's two drunk men were fighting in the stair well. It was very loud. I knocked on our neighbour's door. One of them is a policeman. I was hoping he would do something about the fight. A woman was screaming for the men to stop. The neighbour and his father in law (both nice people- don't get me wrong) did not want to get involved. I did not dare to do something by myself knowing how dangerous it could be. Later that morning I walked down the stair well to see a patch of dried blood where one man's head had been banged against the concrete. It has now been washed away.

We are all back in to our regular schedule now. I'm hoping motivation levels will pick up more soon (there's a slight improvement in my outlook.) We had some nice time with friends over the weekend, sharing real fellowship with one of our Sakha friends, Masha. Rustam was with us too. It will get cold tomorrow though. We are expecting a couple of weeks in the negative twenties and thirties. We haven't had much cold weather this winter though. I hope that will be the last of it, and then I can start looking forward to Spring.