Our home away from home

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     So, many of you have been asking about our living situation. In this post, I will tell you a bit about that. In the pictures we posted, you can see a three-story brick and concrete building with an exterior stairway going up one corner. That is where we live. The rest of the building is a boys’ dorm, but there are three staff apartments on the end closest to the road. We live on the second floor, so we have a nice little balcony of sorts where the stairs landing meets our door. When you enter, there is a main room with the bathroom off to the left, then at the back are two bedrooms side-by-side. Jeff and I share the outer one, Delaney uses the inner one. The main room has three areas: the entryway, the dining/living area, and the kitchen. The entryway is sort of defined by the bathroom Wall, then the kitchen is around the corner. We have defined that space by pushing our two long skinny tables together and making them into the central work/life area of the household. The kitchen side of the table is more used like a countertop, where food prep, baking and serving happen (unless we have guests, no one usually sits here unless they are sitting while chopping veggies). There is a vinyl table cloth over the tables so they are easier to keep clean. We have one of the ubiquitous Bolivian frazadas to throw over it when we have company, as it is in pretty tough shape in places. Our frazada is purple, with red, green and blue veins woven into it. The dining/living room side of the table is where non-cooking action happens. I work here where I can spread out, because my desk in my office space is very small and the office is shared with two others who both see a lot of students so it’s not a very good place to concentrate during the school day. Jeff does his various projects here, and this is also where we play cards, listen to music, etc. There are little wooden chairs to sit here. There is one cushion, but we are going to look in La Paz this weekend to see if we can find more so that we can all have a more comfortable seat.

     Our little bathroom is compact, but nice. The floor is tiled, and that continues about halfway up the walls. This makes it easier to keep clean, and serves another practical purpose because the floor is wet much of the time and a rubber scraper (sort of like the blade on a squeegee) is used on the floor to push the water into a central floor drain so that it has some chance of being clean and dry. The shower is in one corner, with a wrapround shower curtain covering the two sides that are not walls. It has a lip about three inches high that helps keep the water from just running onto the floor, and the showerhead is an electric on-demand water heater. This is a wonderful thing when you live where there is no heated water – the only downside is that the temperature of the water is controlled by the water flow rate, so the harder you turn the water on, the colder it gets. It can be quite the balancing act to get the water hot and have decent pressure to take your shower at the same time, but it is SO much better than the cold showers one took before these were installed! In Bolivia, you toss your used toilet paper in a little trash can when you’re done with it, because the plumbing can’t really handle flushing it, so every bathroom, no matter how primitive or fancy, has a little trash can for this purpose. There is also a little pedestal sink and Cookie’s sandbox.

     In the kitchen, there is a small stove with three burners and an oven, all powered by a propane tank. We have two tanks, that way hopefully you always have one in reserve, although when we got here one was empty, which is why we ran out of cooking gas last week when the truck was late. The propane truck is definitely a QBE (quintessentially Bolivian experience)… the truck comes lumbering down the gravel road to the campus driveway right outside our door and stops. Everyone grabs their empty tanks and stands in line to exchange them right off the truck – it’s a panel-sided truck like you see farmers emptying the hopper on the combine into during the harvest at home. You pay your 27 Bs (about $4) and get a full tank. This was at 5:30 am last Saturday, so it was dark and kind of surreal. J

     There is a sink/drainboard combo in the kitchen (cold water faucets only since there are no water heaters), then a small counter and a small fridge that is about 20% larger than a regular dorm fridge. It has a little freezer in the top, so Delaney’s new experience here has been her first ice cube trays! We have had the ice-and-water in the door her whole life, so this is a new thing for her, although she has used them a few times at Nana’s house before, she has never lived with one. She is a bit obsessive about making sure there is enough ice, although she has discovered that the cubes all melt together in her little bowl and then refreeze in a mess whenever the power is out. LOL!

     There are two sliding windows in the main room that face up the mountain (Uchumachi), and one in each of our bedrooms that face the yard alongside the classroom building that stretches that direction from the boys’ dorm. They have screens, although a couple of them are in bad shape. Jeff sewed one up a little, but the fabric is old and brittle, so he had to stop. We hope to get these replaced soon, we just need to find where to get the fabric.

     The floor of our apartment is concrete that must have been painted a soft baby blue at some point, although it is pretty spotty now. I have some throw rugs picked out in La Paz, one each for the bedrooms and the main room behind the table, but I have to save up because they are a little pricey. The walls are plain white with a maroon trim around the bottom. We have been busy hanging things on the walls wherever possible, both to get stuff off the floor (we don’t have many shelves to put things away, and there are no cupboards or chests) and to brighten the place up a little. There are curtains at the windows, yellow in the main room and blue in the bedrooms. It is nice to have some privacy after dark. Since we are in the tropics, it gets dark here by 6:30 or so, and the sun comes up about the same time in the morning, although we don’t actually see the sun at sunrise and sunset because of the mountains.

     One of our great joys here is getting up early and listening to the birds. By midday, they are much quieter, but in the morning there is the most wonder cacophony outside! It is often punctuated by the group cawing event of the Andean Guans, who sound a bit like crows but look a bit like quail or pheasant who perch in trees. Some of our favorite birds are the ones with the yellow bellies that you can see in our pictures. We haven’t figured out what they are yet, but with their color pattern and size, we wonder if they aren’t some kind of oriole. There are also red canaries nesting nearby, swallows, and some little wren-like birds with mohawks who have the most beautiful song. The trees out front are always full of birds in the morning, and the hummingbirds are a special treat with their bright emerald or sapphire bodies suspended by their nearly invisible wings.

     You will see many pictures of Uchumachi from our “balcony” because it is often the first thing we see when we go out the door in the morning. It is such an incredible view up the mountain, and it is constantly changing. We enjoy observing the many moods of our mountain.

     I will work on titling our photos this weekend while we have the high-speed connection in La Paz, so please enjoy and share with your friends!

Paz,
Susan