We have just come to the end of day three living in our new apartment, or Sherbet Manor as it’s known by us and our friends. This is how it began:
I woke up at around 5:30 to the sounds of a hard rain and a million chickens, ducks, geese, parrots and turkeys- all of which live on our street as pets/future dinners. I made some “fowl play” joke to Joe and drifted back to sleep. But I had a nagging feeling that wouldn’t let me sleep much longer. The feeling you have when you first move into a new home and you have a million things to clean, find a place for and put away. So by 7am, I was up and dressed…in yesterday’s clothes because I’d yet to find my other clean clothes in the random suitcase.
My first plan of attack was to clean the kitchen better from the previous night’s last minute dinner with friends. We had invited the Salinas family over spur of the moment because they live so close, and because we owe them about 1,000 dinners for all they have done to help us here in Ecuador since day one including helping us move into Sherbet Manor. But at the hour they were supposed to arrive for taco salad night, our drains in the guest bathroom decided to explode and ooze dirt, grime, hair and who knows what. When I say “drains” plural, I mean the shower drain, the sink drain and the strange bathroom floor drain which serves no other purpose than to drain the drains should the other drains get clogged. So I call my landlord, Sra. Paz, to come look at the explosion. Sra. Paz has no idea what to do so she calls her grown daughter, Liz, up to help. Liz just wanted to flirt with Joe until her mom reminded her what they were there for. Liz tries to dial a plumber but her phone is not working. I offer her my phone but she doesn’t know the number and her phone made all her contacts invisible somehow. So she screams out the window to a neighbor below. He comes up to our place too. So at this point we have Joe in the shower barefoot trying to plunge drain #1 with Liz trying to get in the shower with him when I turn my head. Sra. Paz is sitting in my living room asking my why doesn’t Carlie go to school here. And we have some guy who I assume is our neighbor who is also barefoot trying to plunge drain #2. (Drain #3 would correct itself once 1 and 2 were fixed.) Somehow we managed to get all the drains unclogged, go to the grocery store, cook dinner and have a wonderful evening with friends all at the same time.
My next plan of attack this morning was to walk to the hardware store located barely a block from our house. I was going to finish paying on a washer and dryer that I had on “lay-away”. The store is fairly large as far as hardware stores in our town go with three and a half levels of oddities to look at. We now call it the Lowe’s of Tena. The owners, a husband and wife, know me very well as I have bought stuff there for the four different homes we’ve lived in here. I even placed a campaign tract with the husband. He’s friendly but I can never get the wife to smile. Anyway, I went in and paid the balance. The truck driver that always hangs around outside to take customers home was ready and waiting for me. As he loaded the set, I noticed the dryer didn’t have a air vent tube. I asked him about it. He claimed that it did have one and when I asked to see it he showed me the washer tubes. Obviously he makes a better truck driver than the Maytag guy. So then I asked the owner. He told me it doesn’t come with it, that it would be a separate purchase. Anxious to get home and wash and dry clothes I said ‘Ok, I’ll buy it’.
“Oh, well we don’t sell it.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re a hardware store, not an appliance store.”
“But you also sell appliances.”
Blank stare and weird crooked smile.
By now, several of the young guys who work there have grouped themselves together in the corner to stare and giggle at the foreigner who’s crazy enough to ask for all the missing parts.
“Just buy this tube. It’s only $8,” the owner says. He holds up a hard PVC pipe, not the aluminum flexible tube that I need. They show me that it will indeed fit on the hole in the back of the dryer.
“But the dryer is going into a small wooden shed. Where/How is the hot air from this large tube supposed to exit?” I ask, not grasping what they want me to do with this make-shift dryer vent.
“Isn’t there an opening somewhere in the shed?”
“No. Well… just a screened window,” I say.
“Then buy this tube for $2.” He holds up a short elbow-shaped tube and proceeds to indicate to me how it will connect to the other larger $8 tube I’m supposed to buy and then it will be able to go up and out of the window.
“How high is the window?” he asks.
“I have no idea,” I say, trying not to sound exasperated because what fool measures how high the windows are before you buy a dryer?!?
At that moment a light bulb goes off in my sleepy brain. The dryer is gas. I will need to buy a gas tank.
“Do you sell gas tanks here?” I ask the owner as he’s still holding up the two pipes.
“Yes. $58.”
“I need to buy one then.”
“We only have the tanks. No gas. There’s no gas anywhere in Tena”. He explains that there’s a gas shortage in the entire jungle but that if I come back in the afternoon, he’ll have some. I tell him I’ll go measure how high the windows are from my dryer (eye roll*) and I’ll be back later with the exact measurements and for my full gas tank.
The driver, who as I’ve mentioned isn’t the smartest tool in the shed, drives me around the corner remarking how close I live to “Lowes.” Then he proceeds to go into the story he’s told me numerous times before about how he misses his “ex-woman” who he has children with, but he found God after trying to commit suicide (as he shows me the slit wrist scar*) and she still parties every weekend in the discos and…yadda yadda. Apparently she lives on the corner of my street. He drives past her house and beeps the horn. She comes outside but pretends she doesn’t see him. He continues to drive past her on to my house but not without first begging me to plead his case in his behalf to her and ‘talk about the Bible with her.’ I just wanted to get my washer and dryer home, not be involved in a soap opera.
Back at our apartment, Joe and the truck driver unload the machines. The driver tells Joe that the way the shed is set up, it would be better to simply cut a hole in the wood shed and make the tube shoot straight out. Joe asks Sra. Paz if we have permission to saw up her shed. Horror spread across her face, but it soon disappeared once she saw my brand new sparkling washer and dryer.
“Oh!” she exclaimed “They make my shed look so elegant! Sure! You can cut a small hole for the tube!” She immediately grabbed a broom and started sweeping out the old shed as the truck driver left. Within 30 minutes she had completely emptied it of all her junk that she had kept in there for years and wiped the walls down with bleach water. If she was going to have beautiful machines in her shed, her shed must look the part! Then she put a small wooden table in there to rest my clothes basket and detergents on. “But, try to find a pretty table cloth for it,” she gushed as she began to sweep the entire yard around the outside of the shed. She was getting so excited, it got me excited and I walked back to Lowe’s and bought her a $2 floor mat for the entrance of the shed. It’s green with a dolphin on it and I could tell by the look in her eyes it was the icing on the cake. She began to clean the rest of the yard and by the end of the day she had raked all the leaves, swept the dirt driveway and had a bonfire with all the dead branches and rubbish- all because her new gringo tenants have placed beautiful machines in her shed.
As she was raking and sweeping like a bumble bee, Joe was setting the machines up. Sra. Paz also has an old washing machine and Joe had to move all three machines around until they could fit and still have room to close the door. But the way the dryer is now situated, Joe says we’ll have to buy some kind of extra-long tube for the gas tank since there’s hardly any room for the tank. Also, since there’s 3 machines, technically you can only have two machines plugged in at the same time since she only has one outlet in there. But since all the plugs are large three-pronged plugs, only one can be plugged in at a time. So Joe also wants to buy connectors/extension cords. Then Joe got to thinking about the PVC pipe for the dryer. He’s worried the PVC will get too hot and give off toxic fumes. Then he went to put the washer tube down into the other tube where the water drains out. It didn’t fit because the washer tube isn’t flexible. So Joe had to saw part of her pipe so that ours would fit in.
“This is a whole lot of fixing to make it work, “ Sra. Paz giggled. I left Joe and went to get a few groceries at the bright green corner store. We hadn’t eaten breakfast or had coffee yet and Jessica was coming over in 15 minutes to pick up the keys to our old house. I tried to shop quickly, but the store owner wanted to know all about what country I’m from and how she wishes she knew English so she could help her daughters with their English homework. She gave me a sideways look to see if I’d offer her family English lessons. I asked her to weigh my chicken instead.
I showed up back at our apartment at the same moment Jessica did. She stayed for about 20 minutes and told us how she’s enjoying working in the Chinese language group in Quito. She gave us her presentation in Chinese, but I could still hear her Spanish accent. After breakfast Joe went in search for a tank of gas for the dryer. None to be had. Everyone told him to come back after lunch. Meanwhile I had to work my shift teaching online. It was getting hot and I was in the middle of hanging clothes on the wooden clothes rack that we had to cut in half, then nail and glue back together because it wouldn’t fit through our front door.
After work, I cooked up a hearty chicken and rice lunch which Joe was “too hot and tired” to eat. He had just come back for the third time searching for gas. It never arrived. Carlie was bored and asked if a witness neighbor, Aedyn, could come over to play her version of baseball. Within minutes of his arrival, somehow every kid in our neighborhood found out about the game and invited themselves over to play too. Joe was the umpire and Sra. Paz pulled up a plastic chair and became a cheering fan. I took the time to do some laundry in my own brand new washer sitting inside of a cleaned-out wooden shed. As I hung the last sock of the mountain-load of laundry I did, it began to thunder and lightning. I had to take all the clothes down and hang them under the roof. Then I went inside to finish hanging and folding clothes. I could hear the kids leaving for home, but overheard one boy complaining he won’t play with Carlie and Joe again because “They don’t talk like we do and I can’t understand them.” Sra. Paz tried to comfort him by saying “The don’t, because they can’t.” The kid felt better, but I didn’t.
Inside Carlie and Aedyn played Barbies. Carlie dressed them up and Aedyn pretended to shoot them dead, as well as Maisy and Jones. I wonder how long they will play so well together. Later in the evening Carlie showered and Joe relaxed reading my Kindle. I washed the dishes again in my mini-sink (it’s the tiniest sink I’ve ever seen and barely deep enough to wash a fork). I want the kitchen to be in order for Lola tomorrow. Lola helps me cook and clean on Thursdays and our whole family is excited to have her crepes for breakfast tomorrow at 8am.
After I put the dogs ‘to bed’ Carlie said she was hungry. So I made her and I some popcorn and we sat in our plastic chairs and talked.
“What was the best part of your day today,” I asked her as I’ve been asking her since she was six.
“Right now,” she replied. I agreed.
And so went our third day living here at Sherbet Manor.
I woke up at around 5:30 to the sounds of a hard rain and a million chickens, ducks, geese, parrots and turkeys- all of which live on our street as pets/future dinners. I made some “fowl play” joke to Joe and drifted back to sleep. But I had a nagging feeling that wouldn’t let me sleep much longer. The feeling you have when you first move into a new home and you have a million things to clean, find a place for and put away. So by 7am, I was up and dressed…in yesterday’s clothes because I’d yet to find my other clean clothes in the random suitcase.
My first plan of attack was to clean the kitchen better from the previous night’s last minute dinner with friends. We had invited the Salinas family over spur of the moment because they live so close, and because we owe them about 1,000 dinners for all they have done to help us here in Ecuador since day one including helping us move into Sherbet Manor. But at the hour they were supposed to arrive for taco salad night, our drains in the guest bathroom decided to explode and ooze dirt, grime, hair and who knows what. When I say “drains” plural, I mean the shower drain, the sink drain and the strange bathroom floor drain which serves no other purpose than to drain the drains should the other drains get clogged. So I call my landlord, Sra. Paz, to come look at the explosion. Sra. Paz has no idea what to do so she calls her grown daughter, Liz, up to help. Liz just wanted to flirt with Joe until her mom reminded her what they were there for. Liz tries to dial a plumber but her phone is not working. I offer her my phone but she doesn’t know the number and her phone made all her contacts invisible somehow. So she screams out the window to a neighbor below. He comes up to our place too. So at this point we have Joe in the shower barefoot trying to plunge drain #1 with Liz trying to get in the shower with him when I turn my head. Sra. Paz is sitting in my living room asking my why doesn’t Carlie go to school here. And we have some guy who I assume is our neighbor who is also barefoot trying to plunge drain #2. (Drain #3 would correct itself once 1 and 2 were fixed.) Somehow we managed to get all the drains unclogged, go to the grocery store, cook dinner and have a wonderful evening with friends all at the same time.
My next plan of attack this morning was to walk to the hardware store located barely a block from our house. I was going to finish paying on a washer and dryer that I had on “lay-away”. The store is fairly large as far as hardware stores in our town go with three and a half levels of oddities to look at. We now call it the Lowe’s of Tena. The owners, a husband and wife, know me very well as I have bought stuff there for the four different homes we’ve lived in here. I even placed a campaign tract with the husband. He’s friendly but I can never get the wife to smile. Anyway, I went in and paid the balance. The truck driver that always hangs around outside to take customers home was ready and waiting for me. As he loaded the set, I noticed the dryer didn’t have a air vent tube. I asked him about it. He claimed that it did have one and when I asked to see it he showed me the washer tubes. Obviously he makes a better truck driver than the Maytag guy. So then I asked the owner. He told me it doesn’t come with it, that it would be a separate purchase. Anxious to get home and wash and dry clothes I said ‘Ok, I’ll buy it’.
“Oh, well we don’t sell it.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re a hardware store, not an appliance store.”
“But you also sell appliances.”
Blank stare and weird crooked smile.
By now, several of the young guys who work there have grouped themselves together in the corner to stare and giggle at the foreigner who’s crazy enough to ask for all the missing parts.
“Just buy this tube. It’s only $8,” the owner says. He holds up a hard PVC pipe, not the aluminum flexible tube that I need. They show me that it will indeed fit on the hole in the back of the dryer.
“But the dryer is going into a small wooden shed. Where/How is the hot air from this large tube supposed to exit?” I ask, not grasping what they want me to do with this make-shift dryer vent.
“Isn’t there an opening somewhere in the shed?”
“No. Well… just a screened window,” I say.
“Then buy this tube for $2.” He holds up a short elbow-shaped tube and proceeds to indicate to me how it will connect to the other larger $8 tube I’m supposed to buy and then it will be able to go up and out of the window.
“How high is the window?” he asks.
“I have no idea,” I say, trying not to sound exasperated because what fool measures how high the windows are before you buy a dryer?!?
At that moment a light bulb goes off in my sleepy brain. The dryer is gas. I will need to buy a gas tank.
“Do you sell gas tanks here?” I ask the owner as he’s still holding up the two pipes.
“Yes. $58.”
“I need to buy one then.”
“We only have the tanks. No gas. There’s no gas anywhere in Tena”. He explains that there’s a gas shortage in the entire jungle but that if I come back in the afternoon, he’ll have some. I tell him I’ll go measure how high the windows are from my dryer (eye roll*) and I’ll be back later with the exact measurements and for my full gas tank.
The driver, who as I’ve mentioned isn’t the smartest tool in the shed, drives me around the corner remarking how close I live to “Lowes.” Then he proceeds to go into the story he’s told me numerous times before about how he misses his “ex-woman” who he has children with, but he found God after trying to commit suicide (as he shows me the slit wrist scar*) and she still parties every weekend in the discos and…yadda yadda. Apparently she lives on the corner of my street. He drives past her house and beeps the horn. She comes outside but pretends she doesn’t see him. He continues to drive past her on to my house but not without first begging me to plead his case in his behalf to her and ‘talk about the Bible with her.’ I just wanted to get my washer and dryer home, not be involved in a soap opera.
Back at our apartment, Joe and the truck driver unload the machines. The driver tells Joe that the way the shed is set up, it would be better to simply cut a hole in the wood shed and make the tube shoot straight out. Joe asks Sra. Paz if we have permission to saw up her shed. Horror spread across her face, but it soon disappeared once she saw my brand new sparkling washer and dryer.
“Oh!” she exclaimed “They make my shed look so elegant! Sure! You can cut a small hole for the tube!” She immediately grabbed a broom and started sweeping out the old shed as the truck driver left. Within 30 minutes she had completely emptied it of all her junk that she had kept in there for years and wiped the walls down with bleach water. If she was going to have beautiful machines in her shed, her shed must look the part! Then she put a small wooden table in there to rest my clothes basket and detergents on. “But, try to find a pretty table cloth for it,” she gushed as she began to sweep the entire yard around the outside of the shed. She was getting so excited, it got me excited and I walked back to Lowe’s and bought her a $2 floor mat for the entrance of the shed. It’s green with a dolphin on it and I could tell by the look in her eyes it was the icing on the cake. She began to clean the rest of the yard and by the end of the day she had raked all the leaves, swept the dirt driveway and had a bonfire with all the dead branches and rubbish- all because her new gringo tenants have placed beautiful machines in her shed.
As she was raking and sweeping like a bumble bee, Joe was setting the machines up. Sra. Paz also has an old washing machine and Joe had to move all three machines around until they could fit and still have room to close the door. But the way the dryer is now situated, Joe says we’ll have to buy some kind of extra-long tube for the gas tank since there’s hardly any room for the tank. Also, since there’s 3 machines, technically you can only have two machines plugged in at the same time since she only has one outlet in there. But since all the plugs are large three-pronged plugs, only one can be plugged in at a time. So Joe also wants to buy connectors/extension cords. Then Joe got to thinking about the PVC pipe for the dryer. He’s worried the PVC will get too hot and give off toxic fumes. Then he went to put the washer tube down into the other tube where the water drains out. It didn’t fit because the washer tube isn’t flexible. So Joe had to saw part of her pipe so that ours would fit in.
“This is a whole lot of fixing to make it work, “ Sra. Paz giggled. I left Joe and went to get a few groceries at the bright green corner store. We hadn’t eaten breakfast or had coffee yet and Jessica was coming over in 15 minutes to pick up the keys to our old house. I tried to shop quickly, but the store owner wanted to know all about what country I’m from and how she wishes she knew English so she could help her daughters with their English homework. She gave me a sideways look to see if I’d offer her family English lessons. I asked her to weigh my chicken instead.
I showed up back at our apartment at the same moment Jessica did. She stayed for about 20 minutes and told us how she’s enjoying working in the Chinese language group in Quito. She gave us her presentation in Chinese, but I could still hear her Spanish accent. After breakfast Joe went in search for a tank of gas for the dryer. None to be had. Everyone told him to come back after lunch. Meanwhile I had to work my shift teaching online. It was getting hot and I was in the middle of hanging clothes on the wooden clothes rack that we had to cut in half, then nail and glue back together because it wouldn’t fit through our front door.
After work, I cooked up a hearty chicken and rice lunch which Joe was “too hot and tired” to eat. He had just come back for the third time searching for gas. It never arrived. Carlie was bored and asked if a witness neighbor, Aedyn, could come over to play her version of baseball. Within minutes of his arrival, somehow every kid in our neighborhood found out about the game and invited themselves over to play too. Joe was the umpire and Sra. Paz pulled up a plastic chair and became a cheering fan. I took the time to do some laundry in my own brand new washer sitting inside of a cleaned-out wooden shed. As I hung the last sock of the mountain-load of laundry I did, it began to thunder and lightning. I had to take all the clothes down and hang them under the roof. Then I went inside to finish hanging and folding clothes. I could hear the kids leaving for home, but overheard one boy complaining he won’t play with Carlie and Joe again because “They don’t talk like we do and I can’t understand them.” Sra. Paz tried to comfort him by saying “The don’t, because they can’t.” The kid felt better, but I didn’t.
Inside Carlie and Aedyn played Barbies. Carlie dressed them up and Aedyn pretended to shoot them dead, as well as Maisy and Jones. I wonder how long they will play so well together. Later in the evening Carlie showered and Joe relaxed reading my Kindle. I washed the dishes again in my mini-sink (it’s the tiniest sink I’ve ever seen and barely deep enough to wash a fork). I want the kitchen to be in order for Lola tomorrow. Lola helps me cook and clean on Thursdays and our whole family is excited to have her crepes for breakfast tomorrow at 8am.
After I put the dogs ‘to bed’ Carlie said she was hungry. So I made her and I some popcorn and we sat in our plastic chairs and talked.
“What was the best part of your day today,” I asked her as I’ve been asking her since she was six.
“Right now,” she replied. I agreed.
And so went our third day living here at Sherbet Manor.
