Our Friendly Neighbors

JM- In our apartment building there is a small room right where you enter the front door. In that small room lives a family of a man, woman, sister and 3 children. There is no running water, no toilet. There is just enough room for a single bed on which most of them sleep, a cupboard thing with a tv on top, and not much else. At first I thought they were the landlords, and just stayed in that room when it was their turn to keep an eye on the building. But no, they all live there.

We were told that the government created these jobs for very poor people, usually unmarried women with children and no job. They manage the upkeep of the building in return for a very small salary and a place for their family to live. This upkeep includes everything from scrubbing the floors of the elevator and hallways on each floor with a rag and bucket of soapy water to picking up rocks from the "yard" (dirtpile) and road in front of the building.

Sadly, the people in our apartment building are far better off than most with the same job. When I have gone into other buildings, the room they have is - how to describe it? You can't stand up straight. It only the space where some people put a storage closet - the space behind a staircase in your home. Literally. There is a small window so they can see who is coming and going, and through that window I see a space about the size of the bathroom in my father's home (or clayt's parent's home) and this is where they cook, eat, bathe, relax and sleep. I have many times seen the kids from our building sharing the load of a big bucket full of water.

The caretaker's children in our building are very sweet. There are 2 girls and one boy. The boy is 13, the girls are 11 and 9 years old. They always say hello and good bye to us, with big smiles and waves. They in fact are quite dilligent about it, and often say each more than once. In return for their neighborly friendliness, we are always bringing them treats from the store, or coloring pages from school. I gave them a set of markers and some coloring sheets and they brought them up proudly colored in the very next day. Sometimes now that the weather is warmer we will see them sitting at the pavillion on the playground trying to color despite the wind blowing the pages around.

Just last weekend I invited them in to decorate easter eggs, as sheridan had gotten an easter egg kit from the states and split it with me. They loved it! They were so impressed to hear the color dye tablets fizz in the vinegar, and then when they saw the egg when it came out of the dye - they giggled alot. They gladly decorated their own, and even drew clayton's face on one! I also showed them how to make the hollowed out ones, and we made three like that, but only one survived the afternoon - they were fun while they lasted. We made a snack of scrambled eggs out of the hollowed out yolk stuff, and they gobbled it up. They even ate some of the hard-boiled ones before we could decorate them! They bit right into the egg shell and all, and I was horrified. So I peeled a few for them after that. :)

The father came up about 3 weeks ago with one of the girls and asked to borrow 20,000 tugriks ($20) because his sister-in-law (who lives with them) was really sick and they wanted to send her to relatives in the countryside to get better. We had previously loaned them $5 when the mother was sick and they paid it back after a few weeks. So, we of course gave it to them. The next day the sister was gone. We haven't seen her since, so we hope she's doing ok.

Yesterday the kids came up to visit. Recently they have been coming more often, and enjoy sitting and trying to talk with us. So yesterday we colored pictures and ate popcorn. The boy enjoys playing the one game we have on our computer. They had all just had a bath or at least a hair washing, and the girls let me french braid their (beautiful, very thick) hair. Then they tried to do mine. Clayt says we're "Those" people now - you know, the ones you visited when you were young and gave you all the cookies you wanted and thought everything you did was wonderful - and I suppose we are. But I always thought of those people as old - maybe these kids think of us as old too... :) That's ok. They are sweet and it makes clayt and i happy to be "those" people for such nice kids.

Here are some photos clayt took yesterday while we were hard at work drawing mountains, goats and gers.