House work back home

Blog Post About June 2021

While I was moving every three days in America to a different location, Doug was busy with work and construction on the house.

He hired some guys to build up a wall on our roof so that it would be the height of a door. 

That way, he could put a roof and a door on and give us a storage room.

This is the lot next to our house. It also looks through, past another empty lot, to another street.

This is where the builders put their supplies and cement bags.  As a matter of fact, today it's seven months later, and there is still a pile of dirt out there that didn't get used to make cement.

After all the supplies were delivered, they started hauling cement bags up to the roof...through our living area.

The opening on the left is where we walk up stairs to our roof. 

These guys are building up the wall, so that a door can be put in that opening.

Here is their pile of cement they are using.

The slow-down occurred when this crew got Covid. They stopped work for a while, and didn't complete it for three more months, in September. 

And if you read my newsletter, you remember the dabacle with the next crews that were hired to spackel the walls. 

The first crew asked me to feed them breakfast and then serve tea throughout the day. When we saw they weren't working and a foreman working for us finally fired them, they came back later while the second crew was there and made all kinds of threats until the police were called.

When the wall finally got spackeled, then a roof crew came, and then finally a door guy (not quickly, of course).

Around November, we were finally able to see the floor in this room, because...

All of this stuff was finally able to be moved to this new storage area.

ALSO, while the roof was being worked on, Doug hired a guy to put screens on our windows and door (You would have to look many hours to find a screen on a window in this country - the rare).

If you remember our first house where we lived by a chicken butcher, you remember the number of flies we dealt with. Feel free to click on the link to be grossed out.

Now we have screens!!

ALSO, Doug had to order another water truck to come to the house. This was about the time one of the neighbors realized the pipes weren't bringing water to the neighborhood. 

A neighbor contacted the government, and the government arranged for the problem to be fixed. While the street was dug up and pipes replaced, Doug sat outside with all of the men on the street while they watched and ate ice cream :)

Water is a precious gift.

Water (and Breakfast) in a Dry Land

Blog Post about June 2021

Two weeks after Karis' birthday, we were able to take her out for breakfast to celebrate. Breakfast is her favorite meal, but with her trying to finish school and us trying to prepare to leave for America, we were short on available mornings.

June 3, 2021

Usually for a Middle Eastern breakfast here, you just say, "Breakfast for one," or "Breakfast for four," etc.

Unless you order a la carte, you don't get to pick what you get for breakfast (hence the weird olive pizza on the table. It's a fun experience, and every time we go, we always get different things...it's never the same.

Also, it was getting hotter here back in June, and this is the time that the city decided to dig up all the grass on this huge field and prepare for some building project.

Keira and I saw the dust flying every morning on the way to school.

Let me fast-forward momentarily to January 2022. We have already had two floods this month, and the dirt has nothing to hold it to the ground. 

On the first flood, mud ran out onto the highway along with two feet of water, and it was hours before bulldozers could remove all the silt and people could travel again.

We thought with all the dryness and lack of rain, it had created a water issue. Water is usually scarcer in the summer as a rule anyway, but...

It turns out that some pipes were broken in our neighborhood and no one knew it, so for a month, our neighborhood was not getting water sent to our homes.

On June 13th, Doug called a water truck to fill up our tanks on the roof. We had not been able to wash dishes, hands, shower, or flush toilets for a couple of days as we waited unknowingly for water that wouldn't come.

June 13, 2021

The price was very cheap (equivalent of $17).

When Doug ordered another truck a month later, the prices had jumped a bit (~$23). Apparently, more people around the city were having water issues as well. 

It was a blessing that a friend of ours "knew a guy" and got us such good deals, because I think for most people, the prices started at $34 and went up to about $68 for a truck of water.

Supply and demand.

All of our dirty dishes...

Finally got washed!

I wanted to have breakfast with a friend of mine before we left for America, and we decided to try out a new place for breakfast.

This is the "Breakfast for two" at this particular place.

June 14, 2021

And this little thing wasn't running around like a chicken with its head cut off because she knew Caleb and Doug weren't going to America, and they would be staying behind and could care for her. 

However, she does sort of LOOK like a plucked chicken.

The Second Coming (of family)

Blog Post about Summer 2020

Doug, Kylie, and Caleb were left behind to finish things up after the lightning-fast move. 

Doug had to take our air condition units off the wall at our old house and put them in storage. 

He hired a crane to take the water tanks off our roof and move them over to our new house. 

Then Doug had to get permission from our new landlord to put a western toilet in our new house and turn the bathroom door around because the door swung inward over the squatty area.  The landlord really wasn't excited about it, but he agreed to it.

In the meantime, Doug was watching the news. He was waiting for commercial flights to start up again, but instead, things seemed to be getting worse.

So he booked flights on a charter to get them out on June 28, 2020.

And guess what?  

On the city's instagram post the day they were boarding the plane, these were the posts:

"NEW ROUND OF LOCKDOWN IS EXPECTED TO IMPOSE FROM TOMORROW."

"LOCKDOWN FROM 6:00AM - 0:00AM TILL JULY 4"

"PHARMACIES, SUPERMARKETS, GROCERIES, AND BAKERIES WILL REMAIN OPEN DURING LOCKDOWN DAYS. 

LOCKDOWN PERIOD: JULY 29 - JULY 4. 

LOCKDOWN HOURS: 6:00AM - 00:00AM 18 HOURS"

Coincidence?  I think not :)

So, while they were boarding, I was watching more instagram posts come through and feeling so thankful.

The next day said, "AIRPORTS THROUGHOUT OUR REGION WILL REMAIN CLOSED TO COMMERCIAL FLIGHTS UNTIL JULY 15th."

I'm so thankful that Doug felt led to buy tickets and get out, because realistically, commercial flights did NOT come back on July 15th, and it would have been a long time until he found one. The charter flight just happened to be the best option.

On the day they left, the Covid numbers in our region read:

Total confirmed cases 5,533

Total recovered: 1,634

Total deaths: 180

Total active cases: 3,719

I am more than aware these numbers pale in comparison to what was going on in America. I was keeping track of the numbers there, too, and this screenshot from May 30, 2020, was one month before we flew back.

 

Fixer Upper...For Sure

Ready to pack?

Here we go...

When we agreed to rent this new place, the first thing we did was get some of the obvious broken things fixed. 

Funny enough, at the same time, the house we were living in had a little mishap.

With all the rain we had last fall, the ceiling could never really get dry and the layer of plaster over the cinderblock crashed down one day from the third story all the way down to the first floor.  It would have seriously injured someone if they had been below that destruction.

We filled up the trash
outside with all of the debris.

The roof where it fell from

In the new rental, Doug had a half-wall in the kitchen torn down, and the landlord agreed to re-tile Keira’s room where the tile was buckling.  We also hired a painter because there had been a lot of smoking in the house over the years and some of the rooms were interesting colors. 

Where the half-wall used to be

Because all the tile was buckling in Keira's
room, workers tore it out and re-tiled.

Of course, this new tile is different from
any other tile in the house,
but that's sort of normal here.

This is what some of the buckling tile looked like.  This is one of our balconies.
We won't be using it because the protection wall is so short, so we are just
letting the tile "be."

After that, we had the house cleaned from top to bottom (there was a dead bird in this one, too – and a nest built into the wall of the kitchen).  The owners also left a lot of items in the house and pictures on the wall.

As we slowly started moving to the new house, we also had to go pick out material for a new kitchen sink to be built.  The legs were rotting off the kitchen sink that was left in the house. 

New counter-top material

Plastic laminate that will cover the outside of the sink cabinets.

Doug and I took several trips in the car, taking suitcases and boxes full of items, unpacking them against walls in the new house, and then returning to the house with empty suitcases and boxes to pack them again.

Sheets and towels sitting on top of plastic on the floor.

A load ready to be put in the car

No boxes.  Just lots of things laid on top of plastic.

After three weeks over Christmas, moving items when we could, we finally were ready for real movers to come and load our couches, beds, wardrobes, refrigerator, oven, washer, dryer, and water tanks.

Fridge and stove covered

Our bed and wardrobe dismantled to move.

Of course, it was a rainy, dreary day, but we had already booked a lot of people to help, so the show must go on.

A crane was used to remove our water tanks and swamp coolers off the roof.

Doug unhooking pipes and getting soaked and cold.

Then a truck drove all of it to the new rental, and the process started all over again to get it on top of that roof.

The movers' shoes at our new house

I think it's interesting they kept this one piece of furniture together when they had taken apart all the others.

The movers put all of our beds and wardrobes back together within a few hours, and we were able to spend our first night in the house.

THEN...we found out that only one toilet worked, but NO showers worked.  And the three heaters that the owner said worked, did NOT in fact work when the electricity was finally turned on.

It would be another week before we could take a shower in the house and a little bit longer before we got warm.

The problems continued to show themselves as the days went on, but I think we would all say that even though we were cold and dirty for that first week, we are all glad that we made the move.

Getting Tanks and Reading Digits

Our two year anniversary of arriving here was February 23rd.  On February 20th, we decided to make life a little easier on ourselves.

The house we rent only has one water tank, and it has started to leak.   And two days before our "decision," we noticed that since it had been raining for a few days, the city had not been sending water to our neighborhood. 

(Apparently, when it rains, they think you don't need water inside either ??)

It had been raining for a few days, and I didn't realize our tank wasn't getting replenished. 

When the electricity had been coming on in the afternoon, I had continued to do laundry, plus we had been taking showers, flushing toilets, washing dishes, etc.

It wasn't too long before we noticed we could only get water out of the hot tap, because there was some residual in the hot water heater.

For two days, we used minimal water.  Showers were put on hold, dishes stacked up, clothes piled up, and toilets were only flushed when necessary.

We've had this problem before, but usually it was in the summer, and usually the city "sends" water late at night to replenish tanks.  But to be honest, I really don't understand their system.

Anyway, Doug went with our language helper, and he bought two brand new tanks, larger than our original.

He hired a crane.

They lifted them to the roof, and...

Voila!

After I took these pictures, I started thinking how weird it was that I could easily read the numbers on the tanks.

Normally the numbers are in script.

For example, this license plate is number 21416.

 

This one is 550



367900

417828

I really have to concentrate to read numbers (or anything here, for that matter), but I practice a lot while I'm driving, and I'm getting better.