A Peace Corps experience that I did not think I was going to experience. But there are always surprises around the corner in life…read on.
Sometimes, I think to myself, “I’ve had enough adventures in the Peace Corps to fill a lifetime.” Life, however, disagreed and shouted, “HOLD MY BEER.” Around 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 9th, here in Georgia, Justin and I were pinching our eyes in suspicion and darting our eyes towards the kitchen. “Hey, Sweetie, do you smell that, too?” “Yeah, what is that?” I’ll ruin the suspense just a bit, it would be an “adventure” for the next few hours and changed the course for the rest of the week and more.
We walked into our kitchen and we noticed that even the air was foggy. Instead of crisp cold air, it was like a blanket of greyness surrounding each particle of oxygen. Let me remind you, our kitchen has the only door in our indoor living quarters. Why would it have a door? Well, because there aren’t enough glass panels to cover all our windows. So, it is basically a semi-outdoor kitchen. Now, back-to-the-problem-at-hand, the smell enveloped the entire kitchen. Since we opened the door, the smell swiftly occupied our other rooms. We quickly developed an intense headache.
Justin and I could barely breathe without coughing or covering our mouths and nose with our shirts. Something was off and we could not figure out the origin of the smell (and the fog). Since our kitchen is partly-outdoors, we opened the main door to see if the smell was coming from the outside. Nope, it was coming from the kitchen. We checked to see if our oven was truly turned-off and it was. It smelled like a combination of a burning pile of wood and other materials. As the smell worsened, so did our headaches and our lightheadedness.
Thankfully, the Peace Corps provided us with a smoke detector that can also detect carbon monoxide. the detector stayed silent so that eliminated the possibility of us dying from carbon monoxide. Phew. After Justin turned off the gas line in the kitchen and moved the oven, we eliminated the oven as the culprit. We also opened all our windows to reduce the smell. Of course, we are now very cold because even though this is a mild winter, it is still the middle of February.
After two hours of not knowing what is going on and the worsening smell, we decided to call our landlords around 11:00 p.m. They didn’t think it was serious and just told us to turn off the electricity and go to bed early. We were irritated that they weren’t taking us seriously and could not understand their odd advice to turn off the electrical lines. However, after discovering that our neighbor, who is also their relative, is having the same problem- but worse- our landlords finally agreed to pay us a visit.
Around 11:30 pm., Justin and our landlord started disassembling our water heater. Our landlords, our neighbor, and Justin have also discovered that our walls were hot. That was concerning. Then, we collectively started thinking that it is a possible electrical problem. Either way, I was not comforted by the fact at all. I decided to call a friend of mine, Cameron, to see if we could spend the night at her place in case the situation worsens. At the time, it was midnight and I felt bad that I was keeping her up late.
Our landlord was convinced that this was still a minor issue. His wife urged him that since the walls were warm and she was also coughing from the smell that we needed to call the fire department; he listened to his wife (thankfully) and they called. Half a dozen firefighters and a police officer showed up in our small kitchen with a fire hose in tow. That is when I was like, “Well, our Saturday night just got more interesting.” Justin and I did not think that the smell we were smelling for the last four hours was a fire.
The firefighters started taking an ax or something and started breaking into the kitchen wall. To our surprise, there was already a fire inside the wall! As the firemen were chopping through more wood, we could tell the fire was spreading. The main fireman mentioned that if we didn’t call when we did, it would have been possible that the entire house would have been enveloped by fire within the next hour or two.
This comment worried me. Our house has been infested with termites for as long as we have been living there- maybe longer. Secondly, the house was built decades ago (possibly a hundred years ago) and the foundation is already crooked and outdated. Given how the termites possibly compromised the foundation of the house and the combination of the old, outdated construction, I think that the house would have collapsed quickly! Our landlord’s wife expressed gratitude that we insisted that they should come over. She said with her limited English, “your stubbornness saved our house.” At this point, there was ash and wood chippings all over our kitchen. The fire stunk up the entire house. We no longer had running water or a functioning kitchen. However, most of the house was still standing. We were safe. We were alive. Most of our belongings were okay.
Around 2 a.m., we arrived at our friend Cameron’s apartment. She graciously took us in and let us sleep the night at her place after the long ordeal. Since she only had an old-soviet type of couches, we sought shelter elsewhere for the remainder of the week. For five days, we spent the night at our friend and fellow sitemate’s apartment. Andrew has an extra bed in his apartment, and he lives close to where our apartment is. He recently moved out from his host family and the timing couldn’t be any more perfect. If he has not been able to host us, our week would have been more stressful.
On the fifth day of this ordeal, the kitchen sink broke again. It has been breaking on-and-off for at least three times now since we have moved on. Our landlord keeps buying old junk from yard sales to replace the broken items instead of paying a little extra money to fix it for good. The best part is, we gave him the money to fix the sink. After the sink broke again, we decided that it is time to move on. The landlord also did not seem in a rush to fix the kitchen because he felt that it was not urgent for us to have hot water or a functioning kitchen.
Therefore, we decided to move out. We honestly did not want to move to another apartment in the last few months of service. However, having hot water and a kitchen just seemed non-negotiable. I also couldn’t stand the lingering smell of the fire that just enveloped the rest of the house. So here I am, posting this blog post from our new apartment! Wish us luck that this place has smoother living conditions 😊