Temperature Extremes

I'm back in Utah now, and it's been hot. Really hot. The fact that my recently-purchased car doesn't have working a/c only adds to the misery.

And every day, I think to myself, "I'm so glad that I'm not in the Middle East anymore!"

When I lived in Jordan, it was HOT. I slept with the fan on full blast pointed at my face all night, and the lack of air conditioning everywhere made things miserable. 

When I lived in Taiwan, it was HOT in the summer. I was riding my bike several hours a day and sitting in hot houses and dripping sweat like there was no tomorrow. But I always had an air conditioning unit in my room, which was a lifesaver. In the winter, it was COLD. The only heaters we had were small non-blowing space heaters, and everything was made of tile. And everything was WET all the time. It rained all the time, so my shoes, my clothes, my hair, my body, my floor--everything was just wet and cold.

Because of my two prior experiences abroad, I thought I would be fine in a non-insulated, non-heated/air conditioned apartment in the West Bank.

But I thought wrong.

I was shocked at the temperature extremes I experienced this past year. Remember my apartment? The small thing with 15-foot high ceilings, no insulation, and a tile floor? The first night I moved in, I looked at the bedspread on the bed and thought, "I'd rather not touch that until I wash it." Plus, I never ever sleep under the covers, Often in the winters in Utah I open my window at night because I get too hot with my blanket on (because of the heaters).

So I laid a sheet down and laid on top of the heavy covers. Finally, about 2:30 am and after waking up at least every 30 minutes shivering, I thought to myself, "I am really going to die. There is no way I am making it through the night. They will have to drag my frozen body away when they find it in a few days, because I am freezing to death." I finally realized that I could put an end to all this suffering and sleep under the covers. It was such a novel idea to me that I hadn't even thought about it before. 

But that's how cold it was. Remember the distance from my couch to the stove?

During the winter I had a small, non-blowing space heater (the kind that gives you second-degree burns on your left leg as your right leg still has ice encrusted to it) placed next to my legs as I sat on the couch. And it was so cold that most nights I didn't want to leave the heater and walk over to the stove because my jean-clad legs would freeze on the way there. Each night I boiled water for my hot water bottle. I would walk over to the sink, fill up the pot, put it on the stove, and walk (run) back over to the heater. When the water started boiling, I would pour it in my hot water bottle and run it to my bed (to warm it up) and then run back to the heater. And that was about all the time I spent away from the heater until I went to bed. 

It was so cold that some mornings I woke up with burns on my arm from the rubber hot water bottle. And I had still been freezing during the night (even sleeping under the heavy covers!!).

My sister, standing by the gas stove trying to get warm after the electricity went out

My one consolation was that since my apartment was 10 degrees colder than the outside air (more when it rained) in the winter, it HAD to be cool in the summer.

Good thing I didn't know the truth, or I might not have survived the winter. After the customary 3 weeks in March of pleasant weather, where everything turns green and blooms and it looks like a beautiful country, the weather started getting HOT. And I found out about an unhappy reality: my apartment was 10 degrees hotter than the outside air in the summer (more when the sun was shining).

Although most Arab homes and apartments are built without air conditioning (at least in the West Bank and Jordan--electricity is way too expensive and Bedouin are used to living in tents anyway, right?), they usually put the windows in a way that creates an air tunnel (to air your house out and allow a breeze to blow through). Not so with my apartment. The three windows were placed in three different rooms with little opportunity for air flow.

It was so hot that I removed everything but a thin sheet from my mattress so that my body didn't have to come into contact with more fabric than necessary. It was so hot that I would sit on my couch with the fan pointed straight at me and would rarely leave, even to walk over to the fridge to get something to eat, because I would start dripping sweat as soon as I walked away from the fan. 

It was so hot that I would wake up several times a night, go to the sink, and dump cold water all over my body to try and cool off. Sometimes I just cried because I was so hot. And the tears were hot, too. It was so hot that one day I scraped all the ice out of my freezer and rubbed it all over my body. And then went and sat by the fan.

I think you get my point. It was SO COLD in the winter and SO HOT in the summer. Thank goodness my car doesn't have a/c so I don't miss the heat too much...

Realities of Living Abroad

I realize that these aren't realities for all American expats living abroad...after all, many Americans that live in other countries actually have money and don't have to live in the same poverty-like situations that I often find myself in. But my years of living in several different countries have helped me become accustomed to a few unpleasant realities of life.

First of all, my showers are no longer "sacred time." I have always regarded my shower time as a time to think about the day and everything I needed to get done, letting the hot water wash over me for way too long (as my mother, and her hot water bill while I was in high school, can attest!). Shower time was my time, and it was the first thing I did every morning.

However, I was in for some fun surprises when I got to Jordan, where water is extremely limited and most people shower 1-2 times a week. We got water once or twice a week delivered to our house, and it was stored on little water barrels on top of the roof. Once you used all the water in your barrel, you literally had no water until the water truck came again.

I lived with a very rich family--we had 4 water tanks, one for each floor!

This, of course, made my showers incredibly short. I was terrified of running out of water--the thought of going days without a shower in the middle of the blazing hot summer just did not appeal to me. I would turn on the water, count to 10 as I got wet, and then quickly turn it off, soap up and shampoo, turn on the water and count to 20, turn it off, condition my hair, and then turn on the water, count to 20 again, and then turn it off.

(Did I mention that for half of my time in Jordan the water in my house wasn't heated? So I did all that in freezing cold water. Oh, and I didn't have a towel for a few weeks, so I just used my dirty shirt from the day before to dry off. Yeah. I'm pretty classy.)

My shower experience in Taiwan was another fun story. The bathrooms in some of my apartments (I lived in 4 different apts) were built "Taiwanese style," with a toilet, a sink, and a shower head. There was a drain in the middle of the floor, and we just showered in the middle of the bathroom, trying not to get the toilet too wet. (It wasn't too bad, though, because the bathrooms were about the size of a normal shower anyway!)

In another apartment, I actually had a bathtub (but no shower curtain), which was a real luxury. However, our water was heated by gas tanks, which we had to buy every few months or so. In order to buy the tanks, we had to call the company, know how to ask for gas tanks in Chinese (this one took me several days to get down), and be home for the next hour so you could be there when the person delivered the tank. Did I mention that you also had to have a few thousand Taiwanese kuai in cash to pay for the tank? Oh, and as missionaries we weren't allowed to call landlines from our cellphones, and we weren't allowed to use the landlines in our apartments to call landlines. So if we wanted to call a business (like the gas company), we had to go outside, find a pay phone, call the gas company, order the tank, and wait 30-60 minutes for them to deliver it.

This explanation might help you see why I once let 3 weeks go by without buying another gas tank. I figured cold showers weren't nearly as painful as completing that whole process (and we really didn't have time)!

My showers now are a whole new experience. I'm still not completely aware of the connection between my water pressure and the Israeli government, but I have heard that our water in the West Bank is controlled by the Israelis (which is a rather ambiguous term--I'm not sure who, exactly, these "Israelis" are that control our water--perhaps the water company? Perhaps the government?), but for some reason for the past week and a half I haven't had any water pressure.

Ok. That's a lie. I have enough water pressure for a small stream to come out of the faucet, but not enough for any to come out of the showerhead. Which means one thing: bucket showers. I keep a bowl in the shower and each morning I stand in the freezing cold waiting for the bowl to fill up with water, dump that small amount on my body, and then repeat the process. I'm thinking of chopping off all of my hair, which would certainly make the shower experience much shorter!

Heating. Since I so often live in such wretchedly hot places, indoor heating shouldn't be a problem, right? Wrong. The buildings and apartments are designed to keep cool in the summer...and stay freezing in the winter! There isn't any indoor heating in Taiwan (I only saw it in foreigners' apartments) and they don't have the kind of space heaters that blow air--only those kind that have coils or rods that heat up. So whatever is right next to them stays warm--but anything more than 5 feet away stays frigidly cold. Add that to the fact that I was always wet, and that's a very cold winter! I almost learned to love the feeling of putting on wet leather shoes each morning before going outside to proselyte, but not quite.

I didn't have a problem with heating in Jordan since I was there in the summer, but now that it is winter in the Holy Land, I have discovered a strange phenomenon: my body temperature, which always used to run 10-15 degrees hotter than everyone else,  has adjusted to these hot climates and I am freezing all the time. This is a very foreign feeling for me, and I'm not quite sure what to do about it. I have been in denial for several weeks now, but a few days ago I finally put on my winter coat in my apartment and suddenly it was much easier to face life. My apartment isn't heated (most Arab apartments, especially in the West Bank, aren't), and it is built to stay cool on the hottest days. This means high ceilings and tile floors, and everything is made out of stone.

The first night in my new apartment in Beit Sahour I literally thought I was going to freeze to death. I couldn't sleep for hours, and then suddenly I realized that I could utilize something I had never had to use before: my covers. I always sleep on top of my comforter, using just a small blanket when I sleep (even in the winter). I often sleep with my window cracked open during the winter because I get too hot! But that first night in my apartment, after several hours of freezing, I finally got inside of the covers and guys, it was life changing. Thankfully, I have a small space heater in my room now (but again, not one that blows air!) so I don't have to sleep in my covers, but I do walk around my apartment with a snowboarding coat on!

Thankfully it's not this cold! This is from the inside of my "heated" apartment last year in Provo.

Air Conditioning. It doesn't exist. At least not in the places I have lived! When I was in Jordan I put a fan right next to my bed and had it blow on my face all night. I would sprawl out on my bed, trying to get in a position where the greatest area of my skin would be hit by the fan, and then pass in and out of consciousness all night, trying to stay cool. Many days the temperature was between 37-41 degrees Celsius, and I just wanted to die.

Once winter was over in Taiwan, summer hit with a vengeance. Central air conditioning didn't exist, so lots of people just had swamp-cooler-like things that blew cold, wet air. I rode my bike everywhere in Taiwan, even in the blistering heat, and to keep cool I would just think about diving into a huge snowbank in a swimming suit or what it would be like to sleep in a walk-in fridge. During my morning scripture study I would sit on the tile floor and try to cool down my body temperature a little.

With the high levels of humidity and blazing heat, I sweat more than I ever had up to that point. I would walk into peoples' homes to teach them about the gospel of Jesus Christ (which is what we did as missionaries) and they would hand me a box of kleenexes so I could wipe off the sweat before I dripped all over their floor.

Yeah. It was gross. I threw away all of my clothes when I came home because I don't think any amount of washing could get the smell of mold, mildew, and sweat out of them!

I have several more things to write, but this post has already taken several days to publish so I'll leave the rest for another day. But I hope that after reading this post, you are a bit more grateful for small comforts like airconditioning, heating, and water pressure!

PS--this post is not supposed to come across as only complaining. After all, I do choose to live in these places! Rather, I hope that you got some enjoyment and a few chuckles from reading about my experiences!