Living in Azerbaijan - Problems with Power

by Judy
(Toronto, Canada)

My apartment building entrance

In 1996 I moved to Azerbaijan with my husband and 9 year old son. At that time it was a newly independent former Soviet state and conditions were pretty poor. This is an extract from one of the letters I wrote home to family and friends.

Tuesday didn’t start well. I slept late because of jet lag and when the water went off at 9am I still hadn’t had a bath or washed my hair. The water stayed off until 4.30pm, but I did manage to wash my hands and face in the toilet flushing bucket although there was no water for washing dishes or laundry all day.

About 3pm there was a loud knocking on the apartment door. I looked through the peephole and saw three official looking men outside, but as I didn’t know them I followed the standard operating procedure of not opening the door. One of them then proceeded to climb up on the banister of the landing, fiddle with some wires hanging out of the wall and then our electricity promptly went off. Before they disappeared I figured I should do something, so I opened the door and told them in my limited Russian that I wasn’t too happy about it. One of them delivered a great long speech; the only word of which I understood was “dengy” which means money, accompanied by tapping of the palm of his hand. I took it to mean (correctly) that I had been disconnected because the bill wasn’t paid. As our landlord is supposed to pay for all the utilities, this was news to me.

At this point our neighbour across the landing came out to see what all the fuss was about, together with an older lady, Grandma, perhaps? Momma started talking to the men, but was also unable to communicate with me, so I suggested I telephone my husband’s office, in the hope that someone there could translate. This only added to the confusion for a while, as I had to explain that I couldn’t use my own phone, as it required electricity to work. In the end I got the message across and Momma invited me into her apartment to make the call. It took a while as I was put on hold and transferred around several people in the office, but in the meantime Grandma was berating the officials, presumably telling them they should be ashamed of cutting off this poor foreign lady’s electricity. By the time I found a translator they had agreed to temporarily reconnect me until the bill was settled.

Watching them turn the power back on was quite interesting. It seems our main electricity connection consists of two spindly wires literally hanging out of the hallway wall about 10ft up and they’re not even covered with insulating tape. The technician, and I use this term loosely, just twisted the wires together again with a pair of rubber handled pliers, while standing on the banister rail. He had no tool box, no ladder and certainly no uniform. I wonder what the life expectancy of an electricity worker is here?