My new apartment

Thank you so much for your prayers as I traveled on bus from Guatemala City to San Salvador on Sunday Aug 12th. All went smoothly. I was quite relieved and thankful when I got the "OK" nod from the guards at both borders (due to all the previous hoops I jumped thru to get my passport/visa extended). I didn't get in until pretty late at night and it was raining, so I really couldn't even see my new home. But now that I've been living in my new pad for a few days, I'd like to take you on a tour.

OK, let me give you the general lay-out. The HIS campus is kind of rectangular and is surrounded by a wall for security. We have 24hr/day armed guard at the one and only gate in the wall. My apartment is in a quiet corner of the campus, kind of away from the general hub-bub, and down a short, part dirt, part concrete path, and it ultimately sits behind the cafeteria. In reality, the back wall of my apartment is literally part of the security wall. I'd originally hoped for the top apartment, but it's not ready. And to be honest, I'm now glad I'm in the bottom one. It's really an extremely nice apartment (and ready for visitors!)

OK, ready to have a peek inside? I have 2 knotty pine entrance/exit doors (however, we can only find the key to one of the doors. This doesn’t surprise you, does it?). Besides, the rain runs off the roof in such a way as to cause a significant waterfall directly in front of the "key-less" door, and it causes the door to swell so much that the door becomes non-functional. So, it doesn’t really matter that I don’t have a key for now. When I enter in thru the other door, I enter directly into a large and strangely shaped room (with 11 walls!) that's half living room and an eat-in kitchen. We enter directly into the living room complete with a nice new 2-seater couch, 2 other nice matching chairs, a computer desk, a TV and a new large (non-matching) armoire in my living room. One of the quirks about homes in Latin America is the lack of closet and other storage spaces. Armoires are used instead of closets. In my case, the armoire is large, doesn't fit well in my strange shaped bedroom, and without it my living room would look kind of empty. So, yes, I go into my living room to get dressed most days. The walls are taupe colored. My kitchen has a small inexpensive table and chairs, a 2nd hand stove/oven, new frig, and new kitchen cabinets. Except for the fake cherry armoire, the rest of the kitchen and living room furniture is a light colored fake wood. The walls of the kitchen are mustard/gold colored. There is 1 window in the living room and 1 in the kitchen with a fairly nice view. This particular wall of windows is actually part of the security wall mentioned above. And since my apartment is built into a slope, the windows are actually about 2 stories high. Therefore, I feel safe in keeping these windows open at night. Directly off the living room is my bedroom, however, my white bedroom door has neither a door knob nor a hole for a door knob. The bedroom is an OK size, and has 5 tan/khaki colored walls. I have a firm (because it sits directly on the frame, no box springs) new double bed, new matching dresser, and matching night stand. My small bathroom attaches onto my bedroom. It's done in a nice blue, has a small white porcelain stand alone sink, shower (almost never will you find a tub), and a burgundy colored toilet. Why a burgundy toilet in a nice blue bathroom? Don't ask me! On the other end of my apartment, off my kitchen, is a guest bedroom that has a large fake cherry colored double armoire and a set of bunk beds painted red and blue. An add’l double bed happens to be also still be in the guest bedroom due to a team that needed to use my apartment when I was at school. But this just means that I have room for several of you if you’d like to come! The above mentioned non-functional door departs to the outside from this guest bedroom. There is another bathroom, very much like the 1st one, off the guest bedroom. And yes, it is also decorated in blue except for the burg any toilet. So basically I have 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, living room, and kitchen. I really like it, and I finally finished unpacking yesterday. The flooring through out is tile...which seems strange, but it is what is found standarly all over this part of the world. I think it’s actually less expensive than other alternatives here. Plus it’s bound to last longer than linoleum/vinyl considering the rainy season. All my windows had screen put on them back in July. And there are 4 ceiling fans in my apartment.

Just outside my functional door, under a substantial awning, is a new washer, 4th hand dryer that doesn’t work, and a new small hot water heater. Know what that means? I have hot water! YeeHaw! However, another quirk in this part of the world is that folks don’t have hot water going to their sink. Even Teri, the big cheese of this organization, doesn’t have hot water coming her sink. She say’s that it just becomes normal to not have hot water in the kitchen. She says that they don’t even think of connecting it to the kitchen even though they’ve got it connected to the bathroom shower and sink. My first week here I routinely went to the bathroom sink (which is directly on the opposite side of the wall from the kitchen sink) and fill a pot with hot water that I would take to the kitchen to do dishes. Then miracle of all miracles, one day I turned on the cold water spigot, and hot water came out. Turns out that I’ve had hot water all along, but I only tried the hot water spigot, and since it was only cold water, then I guess I used nothing but the left/hot water side. How about that, hot water at my kitchen sink! I just have to get used to using the hot water handle to get cold water to take my pills.

One of the things I miss is the lack of places to squirrel things away. For example….most folks don’t leave the broom and mop just out in the open. But there are NO closets here, and thus no place to hide such things. And even the sort of stuff that you normally keep in the bathroom closet and/or under the sink in the bathroom. Nope, just a stand alone sink, no built in storage at all. So, no inconspicuous place to put the TP and still get to it easily. And no good place to store/hide things like Pepto Bismol and Advil, hygiene supplies, etc.

My windows currently have towels taped over them. A couple of very nice ladies on a team here this summer made me curtains for all my window, but I haven’t yet figured out a way to put them up. All the walls here are concrete, and I’m told you have to use special concrete screws or nails or something unless I want large chunk of concrete to fall out of the wall when I try to tap a nail into it. This also means my walls are bare. Very narrow spring rods would be perfect, as would the type of curtain rod that is held in place magnetically (since my window frames are metal), but I can’t find any here yet.

My TV works and picks up a few local channels, all in Spanish of course. I have gotten to where I’ll watch the news at times in the morning. I figure if something really big is happening, then I might figure it out even in Spanish. I don’t yet have internet access in my apartment…but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. And I foresee a microwave in my near future, maybe a lamp so that I can read in bed and not have to get out of bed and go across the room to turn out the light.

Well, as you can tell. My apartment is really quite nice…better than most missionaries I’ve seen. Thanks for touring my home, and I hope you can come see it for yourself sometime. I’ll try to put photos of my apartment on the blog sometimes soon