Fall is here and the weather and landscape are slowly becoming how we remember them when we first arrived almost a year ago in November. We’ve been reminded this week that spring and fall, the in-between seasons, can be somewhat uncomfortable indoors – in this case as we’ve waited for the heat to come on in the buildings. Most every building is heated with a boiler system - hot water in radiators. Most of the time the hot water source is a big place that services a whole section of town, so climate control within your own apartment is not up to you, nor is the date when the heat is turned on or shut off.
Across the city, the big day that the heat comes on is October 15. This year, it could’ve been a couple weeks earlier – we’ve been drinking lots of hot tea to compensate. Last night during the weekly student gathering in our apartment, prayer requests and conversation focused on staying warm despite cold buildings and keeping from getting sick. Since DCU has its own boiler system we are independent from the city and the October 15th rule. This evening I came home to a cold apartment, but stepped close enough to a radiator later in the evening to notice its warmth, then happily listened to it gurgle all during supper. We are grateful for the extra two days of heat.
It’s funny how much my attitude towards the temperature in our apartment is affected by knowing that I could do nothing to make it warmer. In Phoenix, Dave and I would see how long we could go without turning on the heat in our house – partly to be cheap and, being native Midwesterners, partly to marvel at how warm the Arizona weather really was. (You can make it until Christmas without heat in the desert!) So even though it probably wasn’t any colder in our apartment here in Donetsk than it was in our place in Phoenix, I sure resented the chill more, simply because I couldn’t do anything about it. As long as I know I can control it, I’ll sit in my apartment and shiver for as long as I feel like it. I realized that having your apartment temperature controlled by a mysterious “boiler operator” five blocks down the street is just another handy method of control if you’re living in a communist country. And in our case, living under the remnants of a communist system, the boiler man can keep the masses of shivering citizens from being warm but he can’t keep them from complaining about it.
Laura
