Sweeping: the national pastime in Cambodia.

     If sweeping were an OIympic sport, the Cambodians would regularly come home with the gold medal. Possibly also silver and bronze. (I guess that means they would sweep the competition.)

      Everywhere you go, you see people sweeping. They sweep their front steps, their shopfronts, and they sweep the highway and the dirt lanes. Along the road to Angkor Wat, they sweep the forest along the edge of the road. One might think that task is better suited to a rake, but I've never seen one here. There's probably a very good reason for that, but I don't know what it is.

Sweep, sweep, sweep...

     I never really understood the obsessive/compulsive sweeping habits here, but I’m starting to get a clue. First of all, when we wake up in the morning, the balcony is carpeted with a layer of tiny bugs who gathered around the lights for some kind of nightly mass suicide. Throughout the day, dust and bits of leaves and other debris blow onto the balcony, requiring more sweeping - and when rainy season is over, I'm sure that the dust will be even more plentiful. 

     When we arrive from the outside world, we take off our shoes as is custom (and practical) and that means that a collection of dirt and dried mud accumulates on the balcony, and this must be swept away as well. Inside, where the floor tiles are all white and glossy, any little bit of dirt shows quite obviously, and despite the habit of taking off our shoes, we manage to track in some dirt and some other debris blows in through the open doors. Finally, the lovely handmade brooms themselves leave a trail of straw tufts and twigs that they shed as you go, so sometimes you have to go back and sweep up the pieces that the broom left behind. This also explains why you see so many broom sellers all over town - the brooms slowly cannibalize themselves until you’re left with nothing more than a handle, and then it’s time to buy a new one. I should start a pool to guess how long our brooms will last. At the rate we’re going, I give them 4-5 weeks. Thankfully, they only cost about 60 cents each.

Our balcony broom

Details - this one doesn't self-cannibalize quite as quickly as the other broom.
It's excellent for sweeping ants.
(Did I forget to mention how we have to sweep a lot of ants...?)

I give this one another 3 weeks before it's down to three straw bristles.

    

I excel at starting blog posts. I kinda suck at finishing them. (Another unpolished update.)

     I have about five half-written drafts of blog posts. I write a little about my job, then I start over and write a little about my Khmer lessons, then I start another post and write about my everyday life and observations. Sometimes I want to write about the bigger lessons I think I'm learning, and sometimes I want to write about the ridiculous and hysterically amusing moments that happen every single day.


     I'm busier than I thought I would be. I had fantasies about long expanses of free time - and I had that free time for 6 weeks before we moved, but I'm not having any now. The days fly by, and I find that I'm working or studying or stomping on laundry or doing what I used to do at home: spending time online. (Having decent internet at home is both a blessing and a curse, but more of the former than the latter. Feeling connected to people at home is part of what feeds my soul.)


     Every day there are challenges. Every day there are moments of joy and discovery, moments of amusement and delight, and moments of doubt and crisis of confidence. Every day is filled with moral, financial, and interpersonal dilemmas. The soundtrack and background scenery of my life has been transformed, and yet the internal methods of processing what goes on around me remain familiar.


     Sometimes, I celebrate small victories, like being able to ask how much something costs at the market and being able to understand the answer. (It happens rarely, but it happens.) Sometimes I suffer complete and utter confusion and uncertainty.


     I commute to work on a bicycle, passing everyday scenes that I couldn't have imagined a couple of years ago, and sometimes listening to This American Life or Fresh Air on my iPod. Worlds collide between my ears.


     I study Khmer with a young man of 24, who was a monk for 6 years, whose 10-year-old brother died of dengue fever in May, whose father threw him out at the age of 16 because he wanted to go to school beyond the 6th grade, who went to school with no breakfast or lunch, whose mother was a "crazy woman" who wandered from village to village through most of his childhood. I pay him $50/month for nightly lessons, which may be more than he's ever made in his life.


      I love my job, but I fear being the bull in the china shop, barging in to make changes and "improvements." I vacillate between being sure I know how I might help, and being sure that I'm fooling myself. I struggle with the constant tendency in my head to think about how I've done things in the past and to wipe the slate clean and start all over again. What skills do I bring with me that are useful, and when am I being an imperialistic bitch?


     We get text messages like "I think on sunday at 7 o'clock we will can meet and can talk for 3 or 4 hour it's OK."  Everyone wants to come over and be our friend, but I'm never sure exactly why - I hardly feel worthy of so much attention just because my skin is white.


     There's an old woman who comes to the clinic and latches on to me as if I'm her long-lost daughter. She holds my hand, hugs me around the waist, strokes my arm, all the while making intense eye contact and speaking in Khmer, which I don't understand a bit. I respond by hugging her back, holding her hand, and speaking back to her in English, which she doesn't understand a bit. Today, I finally had a translator available and asked what she was saying to me. "She wants $3 to buy food," was the answer. 


     How do I turn down a request for pocket change that I'll never miss? But how do I grant one request and then ignore the thousand more that will follow from everyone who hears that the barang lady at the clinic is giving away money? How do I live with myself when we go out to dinner one night and spend $11, and a mother has come into the clinic that day with a 2-year-old who weighs 14 pounds due to severe malnutrition? It's hard enough to do that when the starving children are 8,000 miles away and you can change the channel when they show up on TV, but how do we do that here? 


     I don't know how, but we do it. On a regular basis.


     How would you do it?

Same job, different hemisphere.

     How is it that I've found my old job here in this new place?
     Well, wherever you go, there you are. And here I am.

     New Hope is a relatively young organization that has grown rapidly in its few years. It started as a small-scale operation to provide some very basic needs for a few families in a slum on the outskirts of Siem Reap. The village is called Mondul 3 and had once been an army base. If you want to know about New Hope and the area it serves, I highly recommend you visit their website: www.newhopecambodia.com .

     When I was here in March, I visited their clinic and spent a day or two with the Australian nurse volunteer who was here at the time. It seemed like it might be a good fit for me, so I stayed in touch with her and the director. As is always the case, things here shifted and changed during the months since March. Tracey, the nurse, went home to Australia as planned. There is now a string of nurse volunteers who will arrive every month or so. In addition to the Khmer doctor who has been there for a couple of years, there is an amazing British GP who is working there until late October.

     As we were packing up to move, I was told that perhaps New Hope didn’t need me to work as hands-on direct service nurse, but needed some help organizing the ever-changing roster of nurse volunteers. This sounded suspiciously like management and admin work, which was not what I was looking for. (In fact, it was what I was looking to get away from.)

     But after spending a couple of hours there last Tuesday morning, getting a look at the newly expanded health center, meeting with the doctor and the staff, I think I’ve found my place for now. I can still get some hands-on experience if I want to, and I have an opportunity to learn a lot from the doctor. He and I have seem to have very similar ideas about how the clinic could run, if only someone had the time and inclination to put some systems and protocols in place. Attention to staff development, clarification of roles and responsibilities, developing documentation systems, keeping inventory of medications and equipment, ordering supplies, orienting new volunteers as they arrive – those are all things I can tackle. I think I can do this.

     It won’t be easy. The clinic sees dozens and dozens of patients a day, and there are few or no systems in place. The doctors and nurses are all constantly running between the three rooms in the clinic, interrupting each other to find supplies they need. A couple of the translators are great at their job, and a couple of them need some… guidance about their role. (We could start with the idea of showing up every day and not answering personal calls on their cell phones in the middle of seeing patients. As a matter of fact, that's just where we'll start.) A good percentage of the limited equipment available is broken, and the med supplies run out at random times because sometimes there isn’t enough money that week to buy more or because no one knows what’s running low. The bathroom has no towels or paper products, the clocks on the wall have mostly stopped working, and people wander in and out of exam rooms on a constant basis. (The doors are often left open because without any air-conditioning, the rooms quickly become hot and stuffy.) Record-keeping is an enormous challenge, as many of the patients are showing up for the first time ever, and writing Khmer names with the English alphabet is a hit-or-miss crapshoot, so trying to create records is next to impossible. Many of the patients are illiterate, so trying to make sure they understand instructions about medications or treatment is particularly difficult.

The "waiting room."
Just imagine how comfortable it is during a tropical rainstorm... 

     People come with many common complaints, and some not so common. Many present with a litany of vague symptoms. “I have headache and stomach pain, for seven years.” “My child has a runny nose.” “My chest feels hot and my legs are weak.” People show up with high blood pressure and there’s nothing to offer in the way of treatment. They have malaria and typhoid and dengue fever. They have HIV and TB and hepatitis. Two girls came in with mumps on Friday morning. Women report they can’t feed their babies because they don’t make enough milk, probably because the mothers themselves are so malnourished. Kids have diarrheal illnesses and if the clinic is lucky enough to have oral rehydration solution packets in stock to offer, their parents have no clean water supply to mix it with. Today, I spent a good portion of the morning running around the clinic trying to mop up water that was pouring in through the leaky windows when a torrential rainstorm came through. And there were no towels. Would someone please send some of those damn ShamWow things?!?!?

     Some people come in with minor and even imperceptible complaints. A mother reports a rash on her child, and no one can see it. Runny noses are constant, and people want medicine or they feel they haven’t had any help. Other times, people show up with illnesses or injuries that should have been treated weeks ago. They come from the village surrounding the clinic and they come from further afield when they hear there is a clinic that is free. They walk long distances to get there, or they ride bikes. A toothless old woman with a festering foot ulcer was pulled in on a wagon and sat silently while we pulled off the days-old dressing and replaced it with a fresh one, and who knows when she can get back to have it changed again.

     Here in Cambodia, people can go into a pharmacy and buy all kinds of medicines that would be sold only by prescription at home, and the “pharmacists” selling them know very little – or possibly nothing at all – about illnesses or medications. Patients might get three days’ worth of an antibiotic, just enough to cause a nasty rebound infection a week later. Patients tell us that they got an injection at the pharmacy, but they have no idea what it was. It’s frightening, on so many levels. I’ve been told that there are an atrocious number of children here with chronic liver and kidney damage just from toxic doses of inappropriate medications.

     Oh, where to begin? Well, I always start by making lists. I spent my first three days floating around the clinic, watching everyone in action, making lists of questions and trying to understand how things work – or don’t work, as the case may be. There are some pretty simple concrete things we can do quickly to cut down on the chaos and confusion, which will only improve patient care (and staff mental health as well, I think.) The bigger tasks will be developing protocols for diagnosis and treatment, which will be a challenge as the Khmer doctor, who clearly has a good heart, also has a number of ideas that are not quite consistent with Western standards of care. (Kid with a runny nose and cough – how about some Paracetomol  [Tylenol], amoxicillin, and dextromethorphan, all without even listening the the lungs? Oh dear.) Nurses need a better way to triage and screen patients – so we'll work on a form that prompts everyone to ask every patient the same questions and write down all the answers on the triage sheet. Though none of this will fix the fact that patient’s stories change every two minutes:  they tell the nurse they have had nausea for a week and by the time they see the doctor a few minutes later, their chief complaint is headache and dizziness for three months.

     These are desperately poor, malnourished, often traumatized people. They want help, and they think medicine is what they need.  What they really may need is a safe place to sleep, a mosquito net and enough food in their bellies to get through the day. Those problems can’t be solved by the health clinic, though the staff at the Outreach office try to address those issues as best they can. They can get sponsors for some families to pay for a monthly bag of rice or formula for their baby.

     They’re calling me the “Clinic and Outreach Coordinator.” At some point, the hope is that I might improve communication and collaboration between the clinic and the Outreach office. But not this week; first things first. 

     There’s no job description and I don’t yet understand anything about who’s in charge of what within the organization. This will be winging it on a grand scale, but I guess I’ve done that before. And just to be clear, despite all the problems I've mentioned that need addressing, New Hope is full of some amazing people doing amazing work. I just hope my efforts will allow the clinic work to be done even more efficiently and effectively.

     So Monday through Friday, that’s where I’ll be. And Steve will be running between teaching preschool, working in the training restaurant, and doing something not yet defined at the Outreach office – but I’ll let him tell you about that himself.

     And don’t worry – we’re not all work and no play over here. I’ll catch you up on our other activities another day.

I have quite a lovely commute these days

     My bike ride to work takes 20 minutes if I want to arrive sweaty, and 25 minutes if I want to take it easy and arrive slightly less disheveled. For the first day or two, I was taking mostly main roads, which meant I was sharing the road with plenty of traffic of all kinds, including buses full of tourists on their way to Angkor Wat. Then I found the back roads, which are mostly dirt, often shady, and full of far more interesting sights. We've had a few days with little or no rain, so there are fewer puddles to negotiate. I pass small roadside businesses, kids, dogs, chickens, goats, and monks, and I share the road with tuktuks, motorbikes, and other bicycles.

     I thought you might enjoy a few scenes along the way.

Roadside gas stations for motorbikes -
 the gas is in those Johnnie Walker bottles.
I have no idea what's in the big blue containers.

There are food carts and stands along the way,
though I've usually had breakfast before I leave home.

There are plenty of other bikes on the road.

There are a few car wash businesses around town,
but these motorcycle washes are more common.

In case I need a cold drink along the way...

One of the best features of this route is the shade...

It's rather quiet along some points.

Classic scene: laundry hanging on the fence, garbage on the side of the road, children.

Sometimes it's just me and the dogs.

I'm not really sure what this billboard is advertising.
It looks like some kind of liquor, but there appears to be a deformed carrot on the right.
One of many mysteries I encounter every day.

All the cool kids (and old men) are rocking the sarong this season.

After several days without rain, most of the puddles have dried up.

They drive on the right here,
unless they're going to make a left turn any time soon,
or the road is less bumpy on the left,
or they just feel like driving on the left.

Water, water, everywhere, all in plastic bottles.

Monk crossing

We have hope. New Hope.

10 pm. 86 degrees. Crickets, frogs, geckoes and dog fights provide the soundtrack. It’s been quite a day.

     Not one photo was taken today. We were busy, and there’s much to say, but the experiences are still just swirling around in my head and not yet ready to organize into cohesive thoughts.

    Steve and I spent the morning at New Hope, where I think we will find our niche. They’d like Steve to teach  a K1 class (which is preschool) for a couple of hours in the morning, liaison with the social work outreach staff about which of those kids need further evaluation, and then work in the new restaurant training program helping to train waitstaff and maybe develop a cookbook to sell to tourists. They think I can coordinate the health clinic, develop systems for training and record-keeping, and improve connection and collaboration between the clinic and outreach social workers. This ought to be interesting. It looks like we will re-create our jobs from back home here in Cambodia  – and will still work at the same agency, as we have for the last 20 years. They can’t offer us any salary, but hope that it will be possible in the future.

     Are we really creating a new life if we end up doing similar jobs here? I think so, because the environment and culture and conditions are so different. We have so much to learn. And we start learning tomorrow. I plan to spend a week just observing everyone and everything in action, asking a million questions, and surveying the staff about what is working for them and what they think could work better. Maybe some of my coworkers would like to weigh in here about whether they think I’m up to this challenge.

     My Khmer lessons started last night. That will be another challenge. There will be slow but I hope steady progress – starting with the Khmer alphabet, all 30-odd consonants and another 40-ish dependent and independent vowels. Thankfully, Khmer is not a tonal language like some other Asian languages, but still, the sounds are different and difficult for me to say, let alone remember for more than 30 seconds. In addition to my nightly Khmer lesson from (formerly Venerable) Yeum, I try to learn a phrase a day that has practical application. Yesterday, I learned how to ask “How much (does it cost)?” which should be useful in the market – or will be, when I can understand the answer. Today I learned the Khmer word for “cilantro” because Steve needed some and I had to go out on a mission to find it. When I told Steve the word, which sounds sort of like “chivansuey,” he commented, “That’s a long word.” I had to point out that it has exactly the same number of syllables as "cilantro!"

     We had more guests tonight. Lori and her friend Lenore, who is visiting from the U.S., came over for margaritas and nachos. Such fun – and we hope to have more dinner gatherings on a regular basis. Almost every day, we meet other foreigners living and working here, each with their own fascinating tales to tell. But the stories often have a familiar ring: People came here on vacation or for short-term volunteer work, then went home and began thinking about how to come back long-term. For some of us, this country just grabs hold of our heart and doesn’t let go.

     The other reason no photos were taken is because I seem to have lost my camera. I can only assume that it fell out of my bag on one of our recent shopping excursions. I have a back-up camera, but it’s not as easy to use or to slip into my pocket and it works only intermittently. so perhaps I shall just give up photographing everything around me, unless someone wants to make a Costco run and ship me a new camera. It’s not like you’ll miss photos; I’ve hardly had the bandwidth to post any lately.

     This evening, we discovered that our “toaster oven” is actually just a toaster shaped like an oven.  It has a timer, but no temperature control, so it’s either on or off. So much for my fantasy about making banana bread. Oh well, toast is good.

     I really can’t wait to have internet at home. Then I can post short entries more frequently, rather than trying to condense so many thoughts into one entry. Meanwhile, suffer with me a little longer…

I. Am. Tired. (Thoughts on Sunday evening.)

     What a day. Our intention was to plow through the list of things we still need for the house. The list looked like this:

• Get online somewhere and check email/Facebook and post blog entries.
• Buy a toaster oven.
• Buy a rice cooker.
• Buy a blender.
• Buy a laundry rack.
• Buy a fan for the balcony.
• Get Steve’s glasses fixed. (He swatted at a mosquito and sent his glasses flying off his face, landing on the floor and ending up as a twisted, one-lensed version of their former  selves.)
• Hang the hammock.
• Arrange for Jaz’s curtains to be made.
• Arrange for some shelving to be built for our bedroom.
• Arrange for internet access at the house.

     Thanks to our trusty tuktuk driver/friend/personal assistant Chamnan, we got most things on the list accomplished. I don’t know what we would do without him. He can find whatever we’re looking for at the enormous Psar Leu Market. He can take us to the internet office to make arrangements, and he can help someone’s auntie measure the windows for curtains. He can string a hammock up anywhere. He carries our bags, loads our purchases onto the tuktuk, knows where to get glasses fixed, and he offers me a cigarette at just the right moment while we’re waiting for Steve to come back from a vegetable-buying excursion. I was pleased when, at the end of the day together, he accepted our offer of a beer (or three) but was sorry that he wouldn’t stay for dinner.

     We had several guests at the house today. Besides Chamnan, who relaxed on the balcony in the late afternoon, Jaz’s friend Boromey came and stayed for dinner (“My first time eating at the home of the foreigner.”) and Marina (from Seven Candles) came with her two children and a niece. Our friend Rethy, tour guide/driver/flamboyant but married man came over and began researching and helping himself to the contents of our refrigerator. (“When you invite me and my wife to dinner at your house? You tell me, and I don’t eat for two days before!”)

     While Marina and the kids were here, Fifi happily showed off his first missing tooth and busied himself using my new tape measure to measure everything in sight. Alice asked for gum and drew pictures. The kids asked, “What is this?” about everything scattered around the house. Marina invited us over for breakfast on Monday to show off her new breakfast menu for the guests at Seven Candles. Boromey wanted to know when we would like to go to Sihanoukeville, his hometown at the seaside, so he could go with us, and wondered if he could come over to our house whenever he has free time – which is every day until school starts again around the first of October. Almost everyone asked how much everything cost. By the time everyone cleared out around 9:00 pm, I was exhausted, and I can only imagine how exhausted all our guests were, having spent the day struggling to communicate in English.

     I learned three new words today in Khmer, and forgot them all within two minutes. Tomorrow, my Khmer lessons start for real, and it isn’t going to be pretty…

     

     The shopping for things we need around the house continues. When we go into shops and look at things like blenders and toaster ovens, we are asked within minutes, “You live here now?” and people want to strike up conversations. It’s a bit like being some sort of small-time celebrity, simply by virtue of being a foreigner. It’s odd, and sometimes fun, and often embarrassing. Yes, we live here now. No, we don’t work yet. Yes, we’d like to buy a toaster oven. And how are you? 

     Our day was so busy that I never even got around to doing the next load of laundry. On the bright side, Steve finally cooked dinner at home! He cranked up some Rolling Stones on the iPod, put on his apron, and made delicious risotto. Jaz and I were in heaven - going out every night gets old fast, and there's nothing like Steve's cooking to leave me feeling that all is right with the world. 

      I think Steve and I are even more of oddity because our of our nontraditional roles. I sat on the balcony and had a beer (or two) with Chamnan while Steve happily made dinner. Chamnan suggested to Jaz that she should call me “Daddy” and call Steve “Mum.” It is a source of great hilarity, as is true of so many things we say and do.

     It’s just one of the ways that my life has been turned on its head – at home, being laughed at by strangers for reasons unclear is something to be avoided. Here, it happens every day, over and over, and I just laugh back and shrug. And at home, I would have loved it if I could make all the decisions about everything (and I often tried to), but here, when I ask how much I owe Chamnan for his services or whether I should or shouldn’t do something, I am often told, “Up to you.”  But “up to me” gives me too much responsibility and stress! I want to pay a fair price, but how do I know what is fair? I don’t want to overpay by a ridiculous amount, both for obvious budgetary reasons and because I hate to look like a crazy foreigner flashing money all over town. Sometimes I ask Jaz for her opinion, but she is already Khmerified enough that she sometimes just looks mildly annoyed and repeats, “It’s up to you. Pay what you think you should.” But that doesn’t help much. Sometimes I just don't know.

     There’s so much I don’t know. I’m embracing my incompetence and hoping that being the newly arrived foreigner will get me off the hook for a good long time. I don’t know where to put the trash, how to give people directions to our house, why the fan in the kitchen makes that noise, or when to water the plants on the balcony. Luckily, I usually know who to ask.

     Tomorrow morning: breakfast with Marina at 7:30, Metfone company comes to install internet, and I have an appointment(!) at 10:30 at the school where Jaz works. I have been asked by the director to come and meet with him. I have no idea why, but I’ll show up and see what he wants. Steve already spent time with him on Friday, and I have nothing to offer, but what the heck – if the pleasure of my company is requested, who am I to turn it down? It’s not like I have anything better to do.

     And maybe tomorrow, enough time to post photos...

    

How I spent Saturday; a rough draft.

     Woke up at 5:45. Typical. It’s just getting light then, and the roosters are crowing. Not long after, the sound of sweeping begins. Sweeping is very big here, and I'm beginning to understand it. More on that another time.

     Made some coffee, brought it out to the terrace. (Balcony? Terrace? What’s the correct term? Maybe balcony is more appropriate since we’re on the second floor.) Fired up the laptop, but no available wifi this morning. Sometimes there’s an unsecured signal I can hijack, sometimes not.

     Steve joined me soon after. We kept things quiet, as Jaz’s bedroom adjoins the balcony/terrace and the sound carries into her room easily through the screened vents above her door. We typed, read, drank coffee and juice. Temperature: 79 degrees. Humidity 70% . A bit of a breeze. Lovely.

     

     Jaz woke up around 8:15 and joined us on the balcony/terrace/deck. Soon after that, a woman on a bicycle with a large wicker basket on the back pulled into the front yard, calling out something in Khmer. “She’s selling bread,” Jaz informed us. The woman began to ride away and Steve yelled out, “Bread! Wait!” It got her attention and when she looked back I waved her back into the yard. Her basket was filled with warm baguettes and larger loaves – we were thrilled to buy a large warm, crusty loaf for 2500 riel, or about 65 cents. We brought out the jam and peanut butter and plates and sat on the deck/balcony/terrace/porch and broke into the loaf with great delight. Thank goodness Jaz understands Khmer, or we would have no idea what that woman was doing here and would have missed out on a lovely breakfast.

     After that, we spent the morning cleaning, doing laundry, and making lists. Steve climbed onto a table to pull apart the ceiling fans in the living rooms and kitchen, removing what may have been years – or only weeks – worth of grime and dust. I decided to sort out the laundry situation. We had contemplated taking it back to Seven Candles (aka the guest house) to pay $2/kilo for the housekeepers to do it for us, or choosing one of the approximately two million laundry places along the street to do it for $1/kilo (the price difference reflects the quality difference, one would assume), but I decided that since I’m currently unemployed and have little better to do, I would tackle it myself. It turns out that the lack of treadmill here doesn’t mean I have to miss my aerobic exercise – laundry is it! I did three loads, using the following methods:

  

• Put clothes into the big plastic tub with some detergent and fill from the bathroom faucet. Soak.
• Choose appropriate music on the iPod. (Black Eyed Peas turns out to be perfect.)
• Stomp on the laundry in the tub while grooving to the music; get the heart rate up.
• Pour out the soapy water – love that floor drain in the bathroom! – and refill with clean water. Soak again, stomp again.
• Rinse, repeat.

     Then the problem became where to hang the clothes. The standard here is to hang everything on hangers on a red metal rack. (I’m not kidding; all the laundry racks are red.) Lacking the required rack (it’s on the list), I improvised and came up with a Khmertastic solution: I took my lightweight camera tripod, fully extended, and used some Velcro strapping to attach it to the back of two chairs. This managed to hold two tubs’ worth of laundry. The third tub’s worth was strung on some random rope Steve found that I tied between the hinges of our back door. I was so please with my improv – and pleased to have saved money on laundry. We’ll see whether I’ve truly done an adequate job – are the clothes truly clean? Do they smell good? Will they ever dry???? As long as I have this much free time and this much need for exercise, I’ll keep listening to the Black Eyed Peas and washing by hand myself.

Laundry improvisation

     Spent some time going through the piles of things scattered all over our extra bedroom. Still lacking places to put things, I made piles. Medical supplies, school supplies, general everyday crap. I was on a mission to find two things in particular: our measuring cup, and our kitchen magnets. I eventually found the measuring cup, but still haven’t figured where I stashed the magnets. They’ll turn up, just as Steve’s iPod did when he couldn’t find it for days.  I hung our world map on the wall and marked it appropriately with a “You are HERE” sticker. 

     Then I tackled some windows. The glass on the front doors was relatively easy - a little Windex-like spray and some pages of the Willamette Weekly from Portland, and there was vast improvement. The windows themselves are more of a challenge. If you’ve looked closely at photos of the house, you’ll see that all the windows have iron bars in a grid-like pattern. I suppose these are for security, but they sure make washing the windows difficult, and I suppose that’s why no one had washed them for a very long time. I used a razor blade to scrape off drips of paint and varnish, then threaded my hand through the bars to wash the glass. Each window is about 6 ½ feet wide by 4 feet high, and based on the fact that it took almost an hour to do one, I should be able to tackle one a day and finish by a week from Sunday, as long as I don’t do the two in Jaz’s room. I broke a sweat, and used up most of my supply of newspaper doing the one window, but the result is spectacular, if I do say so myself. Real dilemma: do I continue to work on the windows myself, or pay someone $5 to come in for a day and do it for us...?

     Midday, Jaz and Steve headed out to get some lunch. They bought something from a food cart lady (Steve is still talking about how nice her wok was) around the corner, and brought me back two spring rolls and some fried rice. Then, more cleaning. We’ll have this place shipshape in….a few weeks.

     At 4:00, the rain began, first as a good steady soaking rain. We brought the laundry in fast enough to avoid soaking it and checked that the rain wasn’t coming in any of the windows. By 4:25 or so, it suddenly poured with a fervor that I have rarely witnessed in my entire life. The noise  was loud enough that we couldn’t have a normal conversation – we had to lean in and shout in each others’ ears. By the time we thought to check the windows again and make sure that nothing was coming inside, it was. The kitchen had puddles on the floor. The corner of our bed was soaked and there was more standing water on the floor. The wind blew enough that the rain blew in on the terrace/balcony/porch/deck. We learned the true value of the long-handled squeegee that we bought yesterday for drying the bathroom floor – we pushed water into puddles throughout the house and mopped it up. The front yard became a lake. The whole event was a bit of a spectator sport for us – standing on the terrace, watching it come down, feeling bad for the occasional pedestrian or motorocycle going by on what was now more of a small river than a road.

     (I’m sure that if the landlord knew we had let rain come in the windows, he would have wondered what kind of idiots we must be. Who would leave windows open during a storm like this??? Well, we’re learning. Quickly enough, I hope. At least there are no worries about water damage as everything is concrete and tile.)

     When the rain finally really stopped at 5:30, the noise of the rain was replaced by the sound of the frogs. They are spectacular. I'd like to capture a sound file to share. The birds were suddenly everywhere, swooping after the dragonflies that appeared after the rain. The sky brightened for a bit just before the sun set, but there was still more rain to come.

     Set off for Seven Candles to try to get online there - no signal. We eventually ended up downtown at a restaurant with some internet connectivity, had some great pizza, and called it a night.

     More photos another time...