Pikhtovoïé (Russia) (AFP)
Only six people live in Pikhtovoye, the small Russian village of Galina Ermolova, separated from the rest of the world by miles of taiga and swamps.
So every week, the letter carrier climbs on her giant SUV and runs through the Siberian forest towards the nearest post office, to collect mail from her neighbors, collect their pensions and do their shopping.
"We used to go by tractor, it took us three hours to travel 16 kilometers," says the 50-year-old who lives in Pikhtovoye with her husband.
His life changed a few months ago. The couple's son offered them an off-road converted by a friend into a quasi "monster truck" competition with oversized wheels.
Since then, they have drifted through the forest without fear of ruts or huge mud puddles dotting the road, making it a dirt road sinking through the trees.
With her husband behind the wheel, hair in the wind, Galina only needs an hour to reach Imchegal, a larger town with 100 inhabitants.
The cows roam around the post office, one of the only buildings in this village with wooden basements. Galina buys sugar, laundry or shampoo, which she distributes to her neighbors when she returns home.
In the 1980s, about 450 people were still living in Pikhtovoye, about 300 kilometers north of Omsk, the main town in this region of western Siberia.
But the school closed during the next decade, and only the old ones remained.
Galina was successively a teacher, librarian and saleswoman. "When all her trades ceased to exist, I had to join the post office," she recalls.
Galina and her husband, who works in the forestry industry, are the only people in Pikhtovoye who have a job: "There are only six of us here, and for me this job is about talking to people".
"Galia (the diminutive of Galina) learns about news from neighboring villages, about what happened," said Vladimir Negoev, 58, perched a cigarette in his hand on a haystack. "If not, how could we know it?" "We have TV with 120 channels, but how would we know what's going on here?"
© 2019 AFP