hard times

During the week, I stopped by the apartment where I go to church (the church has about 10 people – Protestants are in short supply here). The pastor's wife is an excellent story teller, and she has quite a lot of good stories. I forget what brought it up, but we began talking about post-Soviet times. She told us about how life was when her youngest daughter was a baby. They lived in Shimkent, a large city in the south of Kazakhstan. After the fall of the USSR, the city had electricity for only about half an hour a day. Which is livable if you’re set up for it, but they lived on the seventh floor of an apartment building in the center of a city, with a newborn, in the winter. They had to carry her baby around in a fur coat all day and light a candle under her cradle at night. They could make food in the apartment by lighting candles under a metal plate, but to make tea, everyone foraged for wood (I can't imagine there was much in a semi-arid city) went outside and made fires in the apartment yard. There were about two years like that.