Did I tell you about the chickens?

A few weeks ago, my friend Whitney came to Lankaran to hang out. She lives in Jalilabad, about an hour north of me, so she visits fairly regularly. It is always nice for both of, we catch up, eat yummy food, tell our recent stories and adventures. Whitney doesn't have a blog, so only a select few people at home get to here her tales of life in the AZ. This last visit, she told me a couple of stories that I felt had to be shared with the masses. She very kindly gave me permission to post them on my blog.

The first story came as we were walking around town, talking about school. I was talking about my fancy new heating system - that I am both hopeful and skeptical about whether or not it will actually work. At Whitney's school they recently installed new windows. Very exciting! Unfortunately, the quality is not quite what we would expect. Very shortly into the school year, all but one of the handles for the windows had broken. Now, if a teacher wants to open the window in their classroom, they must go to the teachers' room, borrow the one working handle, go open their window and return the handle to the teachers's room. And they repeat the process when they want to close the window.

A little later that day, we were chatting about something and Whitney says, "Oh! Did I tell you about the chickens?" We are all fairly accustomed to livestock being part of our daily live by now. So, you know if a story starts with that kind of enthusiasm, it is bound to be pretty interesting. (I'm sure you remember my story about the duck in the hammam.)

A little back information. Whitney's landlady has a daughter who has been married for about six years. In all this time, she has not had any children. That is very unusual in this culture, and apparently the daughter's husband has been making noises that he might divorce her if she doesn't get pregnant soon. Obviously, this is a huge concern for the landlady. She has been worrying, praying, doing anything she can do so that her daughter would get pregnant.

The landlady raises chickens. This is here livelihood. These chickens are very important. Suddenly, the chickens started to die. A lot of chickens died. I think over 100. She called the chicken doctor. He discovered that there was a new plant in the yard that the chickens had been eating that was toxic to them. Obviously, the landlady was distraught. Losing all of those chickens was quite possibly catastrophic for her.

But, the next day, the landlady comes to Whitney giddy with joy. OK, OK, I don't know if she was giddy, but Whitney said she was REALLY happy. She had just gotten a phone call from her daughter telling her that the daughter is 2 months pregnant. What a relief! The landlady proceeded to tell Whitney that she believes that the chickens were a sacrifice to Allah to make her daughter pregnant. Let's not address the fact that the daughter was pregnant long before the chickens started dying. Who knows, she could be right.

I think the most interesting thing about these stories is Whitney's and my response. A year ago, they would have been completely ridiculous to us and a great example of how different this place is to where we come from. They are still noteworthy to us and fun to share, but, not nearly as unusual as they once were and now they actually seem fairly logical and almost as commonplace as complaining about the awful traffic at home. When Whitney told me these stories, I did laugh, but my response was, "well, of course. That makes sense." And it did.