This morning I took a bath with a big pan of drinking water I had heated on the stove. It wasn't too bad. It's not that much worse than every other day when water actually comes out of the tap, and there's enough pressure to ignite the scary old Russian water heater. There's something a little terrifying about having open flames at eye level, while you''re standing in the tub. Every morning I find myself humming "and I must go & fetch the water" as I fill bottles and buckets for the day. In the spring and summer our view will be very pretty, and by then we'll be used to being Armenians, though that is actually impossible because of the concept of TRADITION---which I will write about some day, because I think about it every day.
In Georgia I felt like I had to have a huge sense of benign irony, or I couldn't have survived the puzzling and completely baffling encounters with Georgian culture which kept me constantly off-balance. For instance, in both of these countries one is continually meeting people with degrees in engineering and/or economics. And in most---in fact all--- cases they are unemployed in either field. And both countries could really use some good engineering (because absolutely nothing works right-----it would take too many pages to describe doors that don't close, locks that don''t work, electrical outlets that come out of the wall when you pull the plug, & my favorite, sinks that always have a standing puddle of water because they aren't engineered to slope toward the drain) and some good sound economic policy, although I'm not sure there's such a thing in the entire world. But that's stuff that doesn't matter. Even a bucket bath doesn't matter, once you're dried off and dressed.
What does matter right now is that we are living in the midst of the most quaint, charming, unaffected, picturesque, uncomplicated, simple, direct and loving people I've ever met. They love to laugh, they are genuine and unsophisticated. They are generous and grateful, and, when it comes to the members of the branch, they really get it in terms of the Gospel. It's very humbling.