Flashback in Time

Now it's time to take you back to the good old days of the end of May 2009. I had meant to start this blog then, but didn't have any internet access yet. In fact, at the beginning of the week, Zoe and I had no internet, no phone, no car, no radio, no newspaper, no mailbox, no sense of where we were in the neighborhood, and no TV (in English). It was pretty frustrating at first.

Our temporary furnished house is a nice enough place, and bigger than our apartment in New Orleans, though that doesn't say much. It has a master bedroom (though we didn't know it had a bathroom until a week or two later -we thought the locked door without a key must have been a landlord's storage / utility area - then we found the key). It has two other smaller bedrooms and two small shower baths. Both showers have the curtain rod much too high, and so water gets all over the floor in spite of having a curtain.

There are beds with very stiff foam mattresses, and a small crib for Zoe with the same. We got a mosquito net our first day here. I suppose I should flash back a little further to say that Andrea's work had a driver awaiting us at the airport. He had already dropped off a load of a few things to get us started as a household, such as sugar, coffee, tea, powdered milk(?), and clean sheets. No salt, no food, no toilet paper, no towels or dishrags, no dishsoap, no handsoap, no mosquito nets, etc. So, Andrea asked the driver if he could help us with a few things, and he soon returned with the net and a few more staples. Interestingly, he did not get an insecticide-treated bednet (ITN), which is what Andrea's work promotes as the most effective way of reducing malaria risk. Because of the jet lag of 8 time zones (though we are only 7 hours ahead because of the US celebrating daylight savings), we slept pretty soundly that night. The next day, one of Andrea's co-workers, an expat named Elise, drove us around to three of the places she shops at, and we got some cleaning supplies and groceries. Then she showed us her house, and we had a rest there. It was really wonderful as she and her husband have a lovely home, and a cute little girl, a little over a year old. We got to see that you can really make a home here, from first-hand. It was very encouraging.

Then the next day Andrea went to her first day on the job, and Zoe and I were like canaries in a gilded cage, as I have described above. It wasn't bad, exactly, but it wasn't what we had come for. By the end of the week, we had been exploring both the garden area below the house (and within the walls of the estate) and even taking walks around the neighborhood. Zoe was extremely uncomfortable with walking on a road made from dirt, covered with rocks, and not completely even. Again by the end of the week, this had improved some.

As you can see from the photos, we have a little front driveway area where Andrea parks the car that her work lets her (and not me) use during non-work hours. There is a high wall and a little guard house. There are two units on the top and two on the bottom with the garden below.