I am under siege from the cold. Through sheer denial, I had forgotten how cold it gets in Ukraine until, three rainy nights ago, I was firmly reminded when the temperature plunged. What happened to my summer? Now it’s dark at 6:00 PM and the sun sets earlier every day. Grr.
That, and Zhytomyr has no heat. Thanks to communist planning, a central station heats all the water that runs through the radiators in most of the apartments in Zhytomyr. The government controls that central station. The heat was supposed to be turned on October 17th, but the Zhytomyr government didn’t allot enough money, so now it will be the 28th.
I’m told my apartment doesn’t heat well anyway, because the pipes are corroded on the inside, so I’ve fortified for a siege. George and Gail, the volunteer couple that previously lived here, spent the winter in the same way, I’m told, closing off all other rooms except the living room and bedroom, and keeping an electric space heater running in there.
Which is what I’m doing, except I’m not using the living room because there’s only one of me and only one Peace Corps-supplied space heater. I’m moving a table and chair into my bedroom, along with a reading chair and some books. My laptop and Scala are coming in as well and the space heater is currently running full blast. I have to put on a jacket to go out into the living room, because it really is the temperature of the outside world.
My kitchen gets nicely heated because of a trick I learned from my first host mother, Anna: she just left one of the gas burners on the stove going 24/7. Because gas is still supplied as the communists would like: everyone paying the same price regardless of amount used, this kind of waste goes on (the smart thing to do would be to install meters to monitor usage, but they can’t afford to). In the interest of conservation, I shut mine off when I leave the kitchen, but a few minutes of two burners going can get the kitchen warm enough to remove my jacket and cook.
The bathroom has a similar strategy. From Carrie I learned that the water purifier left to my by George and Gail puts off a lot of heat when it’s working. As it takes roughly four hours to purify a gallon of water, turning it on in the evening guarantees I’m not literally freezing my ass off when I make a bathroom run at night.
Speaking of Carrie, her block is one of the only ones in Kyiv with heat right now. She lives in the neighborhood where all the embassies are, paying a lot of money for the location of her a tiny one-bedroom apartment. Because it’s in an area shared by so many diplomats, their heat magically gets turned on before everyone else’s. Which just goes to show that even though everyone is equal in a communist world, some are more equal than others.