For the past three months I have been living in a little apartment attached to a house where some Canadian nuns live. They are leaving in the next couple days to go back to Canada for six months, and for various reasons I decided about a month and a half ago that I would like to move out before they left (I felt uncomfortable about having to look after the whole house while they were gone, and it is slightly removed from the rest of the community). There is a building in my town that used to be a rural hospital, but it was abandoned about ten years ago because the structure wasn't sound (the foundation was not sturdy and rain filtered through the roof at times). Two different families recently have fixed up parts of it to live in, and between their two parts there was a large room that my project partner at one point had used as a classroom for his before-school program but had not been used in about a year. There was tile through most of it, however a side part was missing a bit of floor, and in the far back where there used to be a room to do washing my project partner swore that there were tubes that we could use for a bathroom. So I decided to fix it up—the things that Peace Corps required me to do was fill in an open wall with cement that was currently only covered with tin, put a door on the other side of the room, secure the windows and doors, and of course fix the bathroom. My project partner told me to hire my neighbor to do all the carpentry work and I decided to hire a friend of mine who works in construction to fill in the wall and the small amount of floor that needed to be covered. One day I went and bought about 200 dollars worth of materials, thinking that this would be all the materials that I would have to buy in order to fix up the house, since it was the list that my “workers” had given me. HAHAHA!
As you all know, construction and house repairs can be frusterating in any country, but what my project partner claimed would be a week long project turned into a month and a half of trips to the hardware store, pestering the people I needed to do the work, and fretting about my ever-growing costs. Here were several of the problems:
1. The supposed “tubes” that we would be able to connect to the toilet and use as drains did not exist, so we I had to buy new tubes to put in the house. Then we went to find the tubes that lead to the septic tank, and couldn't find them, which made me think that we would have to put in all new tubes. So I paid someone to dig a ditch towards the septic tank, and we left it for a while while trying to fix other things and waiting for April to come so that I could get paid again and buy the tubes. When April came someone else started digging and we found some of the tubes that we needed! However, it also meant that the ditch that the first guy had dug needed to be filled in and a different ditch had to be dug.
2. The guys who did the floor and wall for me worked really fast, but my neighbor who was going to do the “woodwork” took about a month to do a job that could have been done in less than two days.
3. Every time someone came to work in the house they realized they needed some other kind of nail, or piece of plastic, or wire, and so I had to take an expensive ride to the nearest hardware store (30 minutes a way) in order to buy it.
4. Domincans like to give advice and get involved even if nobody asked them to; though some suggestions helped a lot, most of the time when someone came in to tell me what I had to do or how I should have done it, I just smiled and nodded and tried to tune out.
Finally, a month and a half after starting, I moved in with the help of several teenage boys and lots of little kids. It was a frustrating process but once I moved in I felt at home. Even if a lot of people did want to come in and give too many opinions, I also have to give a lot of people credit because so many people came to my rescue during the process and helped out immensely. Here is a list of all the people who helped:
2 Catholic nuns (furniture donations and moral support)
1 Evangelical pastor (electricity installation, ideas for how to fix the house up, the only one who could actually motivate some people to work on it)
1 carpinter (doors, windows, the division to make my bedroom)
2 guys who have worked on the construction of hotels in tourist areas (plumbing installation on the inside—note that they are not actually plumbers—filling in of the wall and floor)
2 Haitian men in their 60s who dug the ditch while all the teenagers lounged around and watched (believe me, I gave those teenagers plenty of grief about the fact that these older men worked harder and were stronger than them)
The man who presides over the parish here (wood donation)
2 drivers for the NGO I work with (they installed the toilet and were able to get the right tubes for me)
6 14-18 year old boys (two would take me to the pueblo when I needed to buy things, two covered up an open window with tin, two helped me move my furniture and paint)
1 2 year old, 1 three year old, 2 five year olds (they helped me put rocks in the yard to make a path and moved the last of my belongings from my old house to the new one—gotta love willing child labor!)
2 preteen girls who helped me clean the patio and the floor
As of right now my house still isn't completely finished—I still need to put lights in the bathroom and we need to connect the tubes for the toilet (I've been using other people's bathrooms when necessary—thank goodness for the sharing, open culture of Dominicans!), but those things will hopefully be done soon. The kids in my town love that I have a house right in the middle of the town where they can come and play, so I've had to set down some rules. First, if there are more than two kids they have to play in the yard—they can't come in my house. Also, they have to wear shoes (kids here have bad habits of running around barefoot everywhere, which is dangerous because not only can they cut themselves easily but there is a lot of animal waste around town, and plenty of diseases can be spread if kids are stepping on cow or goat poop). Finally, if they make a mess, they have to clean it up—the picture below is of two six year olds who were trying to climb up my wall and peek in my window. They left footprints on the wall so I told them that they had to scrub the wall as a punishment—they actually loved it and ended up fighting over who could use the scrub brush! Here are some photos of the construction of the house and my little helpers--Í'll post more pix later.
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