Our House (The Blue House to everyone in the neighborhood)

When we first saw our house I was kind of turned off to the fact that it had fencing and gates and everything. We want to be friendly neighbors and it always seems like fencing gets in the way of that. Since we’ve been here though I’ve realized how important it is. We still talk with our neighbors and everything when they come by, but it provides invaluable defense against the other residents of our neighborhood, namely cows and horses and the dogs that are healthy enough to not be able to squeeze through the gate. One of the really skinny dogs comes every night around eight to raid our compost pile. He’s shameless about it and it doesn’t really matter to me if the worms eat it or he does, and I’m hoping that eventually he will be too wide to fit through the gate (its been sounding lately like it’s a little harder for him to fit through).

Our porch

Definitely one of the best features of our house. It is meant to be a carport but with us not having a car it gives us lots of room for our hammock and outdoor dining and rainy day clothesline. We spend a lot of time out here after school decompressing, and it’s a great place to be at night with the river rumbling beside us, and the stars are so brilliant and distinct when the sky is actually clear at night. They would be even brighter if there wasn’t a street light next to our house which seems as out of place here as a full day of sun or rain. I made a chandelier out of some Coke bottles and wood that I found in our yard. Since we are so cut off from town and any materials besides what happens to be right here, we have to be more resourceful. I think that has been one of the biggest changes in mindset that we’ve experienced so far, going from oh we need this I’ll go get it at the store, to oh we need this, how can we meet that need with what we have. We find ourselves throwing away between 1-2 pounds of trash every week and saving anything that could possibly be useful for potting plants, fixing leaks, anything.
The hammock is also major plus of our house. When some of the administrators from the school were visiting last month Melanie happened to mention that she was going to get a hammock for my birthday they just volunteered that they would make the trek to the prison for us to buy one. It must be a pretty nice one because our neighbors have advised us to take it inside whenever we go away for the weekend, in case someone else might take a liking to it.

Living Room
This is probably where we spend most of our time inside. We eat some meals at the table, which has a nice view out the window of the town and valley below and it is the location of the only internet connection in our village. We have one sort of lounging chair that had a major positive makeover when we threw a sarong on top of it, our projector wall (of course), and some of the artwork of the artist from the school. We’re trying to stem the spread of dirt a little bit so Melanie came up with the idea of using some cardboard boxes sort of as a shoe rack. The wooden window covers actually make the room look a lot nicer, when they’re closed it kind of feels like a depressing monastery. The wooden ceiling made it really easy to hang the instruments, although it is possible to nail things into the adobe. Most houses only have clay ceiling tiles which tend to be an open door for lots of bugs and rain. One step up from that is having a plastic liner under the tiles. We’re even one step above that, with tiles, liner and wooden ceiling.

Bathroom

Our bathroom is pretty posh (especially for Honduras) but I think I even like it better than the bathroom we had in our apartment in Boston. Yes, the sink is tiny and there is a trash can full of used toilet paper (the plumbing here can’t handle TP), but to be honest it doesn’t smell that bad and that doesn’t matter because our bathroom has HOT WATER!!!! Before we came to Honduras I was really dreading cold showers. I knew I would probably get used to them but I spent the months before we came mentally preparing myself for the shock of icy water and going back to a house without heat.

This little guy, Electro-duche, makes everyday so much easier. Although we do have to deal with the power being out quite often having a cold shower every couple of weeks is much better than every night. It’s a pretty cool little device as well. It’s electric on demand hot water, so rather than having to run plumbing for hot water throughout the entire house you just put this little puppy on the end of the pipe and voila, hot water. It is a little scary at first though; it has 5500 watts pumping through it and it sounds like you’re standing 6 inches under a huge buzzing power line. I have no idea what the little udder thing is for though.

Kitchen

Oh, what to say about our kitchen. Although we don’t have all the ingredients we’re used to here, we eat really well and our food is really healthy. We don’t really eat meat because it is expensive and a little sketchy to have unrefrigerated for the hour and a half walk up the mountain so our diet consists of lots of veggies, fruit, rice, beans, eggs, and homemade bread. We spend a lot of time cooking everyday because we have that time, it’s relaxing, and it takes a long time to cook things with our appliances. Thankfully we do have an oven, but it is more like a gas powered easy bake oven. The temperature settings on the oven are little flame, medium flame, and big flame and even big flame is probably only 325 degrees.
Here is a little example of what that little baby can do though:

We have a refrigerator/freezer, toaster, and French press coffee maker and although we’re used to cooking with lots of gadgets and everything, we manage quite well with what we have at hand. For example, we don’t have a griddle or any really good skillets, so to make pancakes and grilled cheese we use a cookie sheet on the eye of the stove. The biggest challenge of cooking is buying the food and getting it to our house. We can’t just go to the grocery store and get everything we need. When we go into town on Saturday to buy our supplies, we go to the market, see what everyone has and then start buying from all the different stalls. By the time we have everything we need, we’ve probably visited 15-20 stalls and then we still have to buy the non-perishables. Each little grocery store in town has something a little different so we end up going to 4-5 different grocery stores to get what we need. My brother pointed out to me that it’s like a real life scavenger hunt, and that’s a really good way of looking at it. So after we buy all our food (probably 60-80 pounds a week) we have to make it up the mountain either on our bikes or walking. Whenever we’re not in the process of walking or riding up the mountain it doesn’t seem that bad of an idea, but when we are actually in the process it is hell, lots of swearing as we get cut off by trucks and the load just gets heavier and heavier the further up we go. But back to the kitchen, we’re very lucky to have such a great fruit and vegetable selection. Bananas are 2 cents each, pineapples are 50 cents, so we have a lot of smoothies and banana sandwiches. Here is a picture of one week’s worth of fruit;

It’s hard to believe it is only for two people and even harder to believe it only cost $3.

Our bedroom

The bedroom is really big for us and kind of empty, but it’s a really nice room. At night we have the street light in the window which is a nice night light for getting up to go to the bathroom, and we get a lot of light in the morning which makes it a lot easier to wake up. It gets nice and chilly at night and up until a few days ago we had to use our sleeping bags as a blanket. Normally, this wouldn’t be that bad, but they are mummy shaped and fit the bed like a pair of lungs and the nylon made them slide off every night. Now though we have an amazingly soft microfleece blanket (thanks to a great birthday present that made it here in a record 3.5 weeks!) that makes getting out of bed that much harder. You can see some of the other paintings that the artist did to fill the strange cubby in our room.

Our garden

It doesn’t look like much now but we just got the seeds in yesterday and we’re hoping that in a couple of months it will be overflowing, thus eliminating some of the weight from our weekend trips. We’re so happy to have the seeds and both of us are talking about plants in science class so we’re going to try to grow some at school as well. The soil here seems really good for pretty much anything and many plants can’t grow year round so as long as we don’t run into any conflict with the rainy and dry season we should be able to shake our knack of killing plants.

The spare room

This tends to just be a clothes storage and yoga room, but it is nice to have this room for putting a lot of our stuff and Melanie came up with a very creative way of making a closet: a window, a door, and a metal rack.

Our laundry machine
Ahh yes, definitely not my favorite part of our new lifestyle, but I have to admit handwashing clothes isn’t as bad as I thought. It’s a good time to think about what’s going on, like how you should wear fewer clothes, and it gets your hands really really clean. We usually spend a good part of Saturday morning doing wash and then hanging it up and as long as it doesn’t rain, which it does pretty much everyday, then our clothes are dry in the afternoon when we get back from town.

Part I

The day before we actually “wash” the clothes we put them all in this big bucket with water and soap and let them soak overnight. Then we drag the tub outside where the fun really begins.

Part II
This is called the pila, and this is where we spend our Saturday mornings. Melanie and I have slightly different techniques but basically you scrub the clothes on the textured cement with a baton shaped cake of soap and then you rinse and rinse and rinse and rinse using the hose and really soft water we have. Each article of clothing takes 2-5 minutes, so when you add up a week’s worth of laundry it takes a while.
When we first moved into the house it was sooo empty. It really looked a lot like a monastery with the bare white walls and closed wooden shutters. Even in just six weeks it feels like home. We feel really lucky and blessed to live where we do, the house fits us really nicely and the setting is different and beautiful every time you look.