The gray days of winter in Andijon have not been with out some, literally spectacular, surprises. I can still see the blinding blue light of the explosion flashing each time I blink my eyes…
On any ordinary given day, I would come home to no electricity, the normal temporary daily outage for a few minutes to a few hours, at most. Or so I thought. I was huddled next to my hot water heater patiently waiting for the lights to go on before I started dinner, but as the enveloping darkness revealed my neighbor’s illuminated windows, I slowly got a lonely feeling that I was the only one without power. And so it was.
Luckily, I have an attentive landlord who came over right away. We looked into the electrical box in the building’s stairwell and found a fresh stub of wire that once lead to my apartment. At first we speculated that a neighbor had cut my line on purpose (the reason he gave me was that people think I’m a rich American – and so they deprive me of electricity?!?), another theory was that a neighbor had switched their line with my source (often the case with telephone lines). After some investigation with my next door neighbor, a few young men whom we believe to be students, we find out that the electric company had sent someone to collect their delinquent payment to find they still had no money so he cut their line, as well as mine. Apparently, neither my next door neighbor nor my upstairs neighbor who is himself an employee of the electric company but covers a different district, vouched for the fact that I live here and just not at home at the time to tell him I had paid my bill. So rather than check back at the office, he probably thought he could save himself a second trip back, cut my line, and went to lunch. Boy was my protective landlord mad! He scolded the boys and had a few choice words with the upstairs guy before he stormed out promising to return.
A few hours later, my landlord returned with a Russian man carrying a pair of pliers and a screw driver. I lent him my Petzl headlamp, and he set to work trying to make sense of the tangled mess. He said he needed a knife so I brought one from the kitchen and with everyone craning their necks (nothing gets done in Uzbekistan
without at least ten people watching), he set out to find the live connections – by poking around with my knife and a screw driver! I couldn’t believe it. Then he tested some old looking wires with spit on his thumb. Is he crazy or what?! But I was the only one wide-eyed and dropped-jaw about it. So I gawked on, the hair on the back of my neck bristling with a nervous “ooooohhhhhh-something’s-gonna-happen” feeling. And then it happened…he exposed two ends of a new wire with my knife, placed one end on a switch and another on something I couldn’t see because of the explosion that ensued. Briefly blinded by the bright light, I could only gather that everyone was ok by asking the only way I knew how, “Tuzik missus?” (“Are you healthy?”) which elicited a few chuckles. Indeed they were, the electrician still standing on the chair, headlamp in place, wires in hand, totally unfazed by the whole thing. Obviously, he’s done this before. I’d like to measure his wattage. Unbelievable.
A women downstairs came out and yelled up at us for disturbing the peace, the boys next door didn’t know what to make of their Uzbek-looking-American-female-living-alone neighbor who has enough clout to get all this personal attention and an illegal reconnection of her electricity, the guy from upstairs invited my simmering landlord up for tea to which he declined, the electrician glowed with pride for his accomplishment, and this stunned Peace Corps Volunteer was told to padlock the electric box and warned not to open the door for anyone inquiring about my electricity, ever.
And that is how I got my electricity back.
