Notes from Sakhalin: No home till our ship comes in

DOCTORS in Sakhalin wear hats just like shorter versions of chefs' hats, and they seem to wear them all the time, even when sitting in offices far removed from view or the hygiene requirements of patients. The director of our local hospital has one that sits very low on his forehead, starting its high rise right above his thick glasses. He kindly invites two more doctors into his office to meet me and they have their hats on, too, fastened at the back with paper clips. (This is interesting, because I've been trying to find paper clips.)

All the doctors are helpful and reassuring about the emergency arrangements they will keep in place for us. We exchange telephone numbers, and the only English-speaking one insists I must interrupt him, even in the operating theatre, if I have any medical worry at all. But they are despairing about their crumbling old equipment and the shortages of every kind, from drugs to plastic tubing. They regret, politely, that occasional Western aid packages are so often mismatched to the real needs of local hospitals: spare parts for machinery they don't have, baby equipment for oil towns with transient populations of single men, or medication for tropical ills that are unknown in Sakhalin. Prior consultation is all these medics suggest, which does not seem much to ask from donors who mean well anyway.

Last week I spoke about Heidi, kept away from work by wild dogs at her door one morning. The door in question did not belong to her, actually, because Heidi (brave, as I mentioned before) was one of the first to try renting a flat here, nearly two years ago. It was a learning experience fraught with worry for all parties. If a spare apartment could be found - usually as a result of a family moving out to live with relatives - there was the matter of payment. In roubles? Or in dollars? This is a grey area, legally speaking, and because it's a grey area, there was no written contract.

Because there was no written contract (and no previous experience), there were misunderstandings. Heidi found the place filthy; down to used syringes behind a poster on the living-room wall and unspeakable black areas in the bathroom. She spent a weekend cleaning and, after a friend located a tin of white paint, painting. But the paint lacked an essential drying ingredient, and all summer the walls of the tiny bathroom remained wet.

More disconcertingly, the family came back. Heidi returned, after a brief business trip, to find them in residence, enjoying her equipment and working through her food supplies. They genuinely did not understand that even when she was away the flat was hers, exclusively.

In another case, the family never even left the house. After several days of strange noises and unheralded visits from the new landlord, the tenant found he was still living there, behind the door of what all had agreed would be a locked storeroom for the owner's goods.

These stories, and more, have made us try an alternative: we are building. The house was partly prefabricated in New Zealand, and packed into 11 containers aboard two Russian trawlers, down there at the other end of the Pacific. One ship has, amazingly, arrived. And, as a result, I've seen moonlighting in the moonlight. The containers were unloaded off trucks on to the muddy road near our site all on one night because the cranes and their drivers work elsewhere during the day.

But the second ship has still not appeared - there is a new Bermuda Triangle, I am able to report, covering Vladivostok and Sakhalin Island - and 10 New Zealand builders are champing at the bit. They have made every kind of start they can, and are surprised and frustrated at almost every turn by the distinctive local work ethic, to put it carefully.

Some gravel arrived at last, but not in a tip truck. The men sent to spread it by shovel soon go home. A bull- dozer arrives, but it breaks down almost immediately. The driver sits on the inert machine until 4.30pm and then he goes home, too.

The New Zealand builders jump up and down and shout (via their interpreter, a quiet, academic sort of lady): 'Well, what is he going to do? When's he coming back?' and other, stronger things. The cement mixture jiggles so slowly that the mixture separates into water and mud and leaks away. Electricity is connected to the site for one day only, and disappears for ever.

An excellent and efficient man comes to bore into the water table and test it, but he gives bad news: he tells us that we will have to install a hi-tech purifier to make the water usable. A hi-tech water purifier, when cranes won't unfold, tip trucks won't tip, and the local version of a Portakabin is an old railway carriage straight from Doctor Zhivago? And still the second ship, bearing essential bits of house, doesn't come . . .

An acquaintance visited the site this morning, to see progress. We trudged around in the snow, stepping over bits of scaffolding. 'You've chosen the right option, you know,' he said. We stopped near a drilling machine that had just coughed to a terminal-sounding halt. 'Oh, yes,' he went on. 'This is the only way to do it.' He's renting.

The author's husband represents an international company in Sakhalin.