Cold

“Baby, it’s cold outside…” Ever wonder how that song got to be a Christmas song? It is nothing about Christmastime, but it plays several times a day on the Sirius XM station that I listen to. Sure there are other songs regularly played that don’t belong to the Christmas holidays, but this one is on my mind as a severe cold front has moved across our nation with unseasonable low temperatures.

My outside camera thermometers registered 7 degrees Fahrenheit early this Christmas Eve. We are not accustomed to these low teens. As I sit in my warm home this Christmas Eve, I am thinking of the coldest experiences in my life. There are many and most of them were in other countries, but I will share three of those encounters.

A one-party Communist country since 1946, Albanians had overthrown the government and formed a constitutional republic in 1991. Albanians were misled by their dictator and his government to believe that America and its allies were going to invade the country, so they were forced to spend their resources on building hundreds of thousands of these igloo-shaped bunkers where they could flee when the invasion came. They also did some other weird invasion preparations like mounting spears pointing upwards on fence posts to kill the invading paratroopers.

So, my colleague and friend, Dan Panter, and I were in Tirana, Albania visiting with our missionary colleagues in February 1996. Our missionary hosts let us sleep in one of their bedrooms. It was a bedroom for the children furnished with a bunk bed. The only heat that the host family had was one portable gas heater, and they had that heater in the parents’ bedroom where the children slept on the floor. They apologized for the lack of heat for us, but they gave us extra blankets. Well, that was kind of them, but the blankets proved to be insufficient for us to stay warm.

We kept all our clothes on and tried to go to sleep, but the strong cold wind made the windowpanes rattle. Yes, they actually were moving because there was no calking around the windowpanes. The panes were held in place with small tacks, so the wind came around the panes and made a constant draft blowing across our very cold bodies. I have no idea what the outside temperature was, but I knew that the outside temperature was the same as the inside, and I was so cold I could not sleep.

Dan and I talked most of the night to make sure that the other was OK. He said to me that I should not be as cold as he was because I had the upper bunk bed, but I rebutted that was impossible because there was no heat in the room to rise.

On another very cold night, I was visiting colleagues in Ajloun, Jordan located in the hills about 50 miles northwest of the capital, Amman. My lodging for two nights was in a 100-year-old house with one-meter-thick mud brick walls. It was frigid outside, and the thick mud walls held the cold temperature well, so the house felt like a walk-in cooler. The only source of heat was a heater made from a 55-gallon drum turned sideways on a metal stand. Inside the drum diesel fuel slowly dripped into a small metal container with a wick.

My host struck a match and lit the diesel-soaked wick and wished me a good night. It was not! Fully clothed, I sat as close to the “heater” as I could and tried to sleep while listening to the drips of diesel fuel fall into the small container. It was certain that this heater would never be approved for use in any situation in the western world.

I had the proverbial “One-way Ticket to Siberia” while flying from Alma Atta, Kazakhstan to Novosibirsk in the winter of 1992. Aeroflot would not let me purchase a round trip ticket, but they assured me that I would have no problem securing a return ticket. Sounded ominous, but I took the risk and began my journey. We had a layover in Omsk, and our takeoff was delayed by a blizzard. We were allowed to deplane, and I took the opportunity to go into the airport to get some food and hot tea. There was no jetway connecting the plane with the terminal, so I had to descend the stairs and walk through the blinding snow to the terminal.

It was warm inside the terminal, and I enjoyed the tea, but I still don’t know what was in my sandwich. I stepped outside one of the front doors of the terminal to get a photo of the piling snow, and the door locked behind me. I walked around trying to get back in the terminal, but every door was locked, and there were no other people around. Finally, I banged on the door so much that a soldier came and opened the door. Of course, he spoke no English, so he slammed the door shut.

I was stuck outside the small terminal in a frigid snowstorm for over two hours until someone came to the door who understood some English. He told me that the soldier said that I did not have a boarding pass to show to him, so he would not let me in. I realized that I had left my boarding pass in my carry-on bag on the plane. I begged him to let me in, and he replied in broken English, “Follow lead,” which I interpreted to mean that they were only following orders. Once again, the door was slammed, and I was in the snowstorm.

Eventually, another passenger recognized me staring through the glass door and came with the agent who allowed me inside. The warmth of the terminal felt so good, and I was so grateful not to miss my plane. And, oh yeah, I was able to buy the return ticket from Siberia.