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On the right are some of the older
buildings in Snezhnoe; each one-story house contains four apartments.
On
the left are some of the newer apartment complexes, each housing 16
apartments.
Some of the newer buildings have running water -- that is, cold water
runs
through the kitchen taps. Everyone else has to haul water up to their
apartments
from communal taps that draw water up from the river. At this point,
people
usually blush and bring themselves to ask me about toilet facilities;
there
is a central outhouse, but to put it bluntly, you most often pee in a
bucket
in your apartment, which you empty into dumpsters on the street. There
is a banya (a bathhouse and sauna) in the village that runs on
Fridays
for men and on Saturdays for women. You've never felt so clean as when
you've steamed yourself in the sauna and scrubbed in the banya!
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Above you see the village store, with the shelves looking even better stocked than usual. What you don't see in this photo are the food shelves, which are typically stocked with bread, flour, macaroni, rice, some canned vegetables, and sometimes sugar and egg powder. There is usually butter available in the cooler. But not much else -- no fresh fruits or vegetables, eggs, or dairy products. Meat has to be bartered from the sovkhoz. The book at the seated woman's elbow is the credit log -- since villagers rarely have cash due to chronic salary delays, they often have to take their groceries on credit. When salaries do come through, the store has first dibs to subtract what is owed as shown in its credit book. |
| Since Snezhnoe is located on the river, fishing is an important occupation for villagers. Just about every family has a net or two set out in the river to catch salmon and trout and other types of fish, and they check the nets twice a day. Some luckier families have a small motor boat to do this; others might keep an inflatable raft stashed in the bushes near their net. This man is repairing his net in early summer, at the start of the fishing season. |  |
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Here are the children
of the 1996-97
fourth grade class in Snezhnoe's school, with their teacher Maria
Tebesheva.
Since their school only goes up to the third grade, the next year these
children had to enroll in the boarding school in Ust'-Belaia, a town of
1000 residents about 18 kilometers away. Maria later left Snezhnoe to
take a teaching position in Anadyr'. |
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| There are no roads built in and around the village of Snezhnoe, just dirt tracks. Although there are a couple of utility trucks that putter around within the village, the main form of transportation across the tundra is a vehicle called a vezdekhod, which literally translates as "go-everywhere." Basically, it is a passenger tank -- you see an example of one there in the picture. They are beastly contraptions, roaring and smelly and terribly destructive to the fragile tundra. At the same time, riding on the roof of one across the tundra is a bit like a rollicking roller coaster ride, and can be rather fun. Village drivers are careful to follow the same track through the tundra so as to minimize the damage; unfortunately, there are also tank drivers in the cities who are not so conscientious, and so the tundra around Anadyr', for example, is criss-crossed with the deep gouges left by tanks. |
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