Remember when we were so cocky about how it never gets very cold here? Well, now we’re paying for it. It does get kind of cold, in the relative sense, and since there are no heaters in the buildings, it never warms up. It gets down into the 50s (F) at night (OK, high 50s, but that is still chilly) and the wind coming off the water is stinkin’ cold. The real relief was at least being able to hop in a toasty hot shower and warm up, (a treat because for most of the year a hot shower is not enjoyable because of the ridiculously hot weather). Well, those happy days have passed. We rarely, if ever, have had hot water for the last week or so, and there is little hope of a change soon.
Why? Oh, well, in a brilliant move, the government sold all the gas to foreign countries and didn’t plan ahead enough to keep enough to provide for the people that actually live in Bangladesh. Sigh. So now there are nation wide gas shortages, and many areas don’t have gas most of the day. Cooking is done almost exclusively on little gas burners, so it has created a real crisis where people can’t even cook their food. For us, our building’s hot water heater runs on gas, and the tiny little flame doesn’t heat the water at all, and blows out constantly, leaving no hot water and no hope for any.
To make do, we’ve found a new use for our prior laundry buckets.(See, as soon as you thought we didn’t need them anymore, buckets are back in demand.) We have now been heating pots of hot water on the tiny flame of the gas burners and with the electric kettle, and then filling the buckets so we can do bucket-baths. Actually, Atticus is real fan of this, and even if the hot water was fine, he’d probably prefer it. Here’s Jon getting ready for a toasty bath:
Despite our baby-ish complaining, it really isn’t that bad (we guess). We were reminded when talking to Taborok about it that he never has hot water, which is the case for the vast majority of people that live here. In addition, when we were reading in the paper about the shortages, we read that many neighborhoods are without gas at all from about 6am until 10 or 11pm. That means people have to wake up early or stay up late if they need to cook anything. So we are keeping things in perspective and aware that things could be worse. We’re still mad at the government for letting this happen (and so is everybody else) but we aren’t so self-centered as to think we’ve got it as bad a many folks out there. All in all, we’re hoping it will be fixed up soon, but not holding our breath (except when we are taking an ice cold shower- then we can’t help but hold our breath!)
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