Feb 6, 2018
Amou Haji has an aversion to soap and water and even the suggestion of a bath drives him crazy.
The 80-year old has lived alone in the Iranian desert for the last six decades but Amou is amorous and looking for love.
Not surprisingly he doesn’t have too many friends around for dinner as his favorite meal is rotting porcupine meat.
But he does like a sociable smoke inhaling dried animal dung instead of tobacco.
Amou’s last wash was way back in 1954 when Elvis Presley just launching rock ‘n’ roll and CIE was still using steam engines to pull its trains.
There’s been 3,120 Saturday bath nights since but the soap has still not touched the hermit’s leather-like skin.
Once he claimed a group of young men tried to give him a shower but he escaped before the dreaded water touched him.
Local people say he suffered an emotional setback or a broken heart as a teenager and decided to spend the rest of his life alone in the wild.
To stay healthy he drinks five liters of water from a rusty oil can every day.
And while he might not wash very often he still believes grooming is important and occasionally trims his beard by burning it off over an open flame.
After decades of living off the land near the isolated village of Dejgah in the Southern Iranian province of Fars, he has now begun to look like his surroundings.
He has become almost the same color as the earth around him and he totally blends in with his environment.
Local people say they often mistake him for a rock if he remains still.
He doesn’t have a house, instead, the earth is his home and he lives in a hole in the ground which is not unlike a grave.
Sometimes he sleeps in an open brick shack that the villagers constructed for him out of pity.
Locally, he is known as Amou Haji. ‘Amou’ is the Farsi term of endearment for a kind old man, The Tehran Times reports.
But the villagers who care for him also say he is a lot happier than some people who live in large homes with comforts and conveniences.
Haji doesn’t seem to have a care in the world and has nothing to lose and nothing to fear.
Despite his hard life, he has lived a lot longer than many in Iran and the West who have access to good food and clean water and the modern medicine.
Haji’s epic avoidance of soap and water sets a new record, the previous one was held by a 66-year-old Indian man, Kailash Singh, who had not taken a bath over 38 years.
