This month marks me living in my house for a full year, the longest I have lived in one place since I moved out of my mom’s house when I was 17. From then on, I was packing up and moving ever few months always with different people. The longest I settled down I think was in an apartment for nine months. Except for one summer when I moved to my mom’s house and shared a room with my sister, I had a total of 11 roommates, five housemates, and a few more suite-mates. I can't really explain why I was always moving and changing everything, it was just that way. I had a brief month of solitude with my own room at my mom’s house before I left for Peace Corps. Over the next seven months, I lived with four different families and shared a room with a host sister (sometimes host brothers and occasionally a grandma) at the last house. I was months past being ready to live by myself. The day finally came when I had a place I could call my own.
Since then, I have gotten various reactions at the site of my house. “You live HERE?” “It’s so… cute!” “How much did you pay for the terciada on your roof? Will you give me your oven when you leave?” “Why is your shower in your kitchen?” My mom said when she came to visit me, she figured she was going on an expensive camping trip and I guess she was right. In fact, if you consider an RV camping, then camping is nicer than my house.
When I first moved in my roof leaked. I have no sink, so I use a palingana (large shallow bucket) or the ground. The water pressure often doesn’t work so the shower literally drips or just doesn’t emit any water at all. The electricity that heats my sometimes dripping showerhead will fluctuate quickly, so that the water will go from a comfortable scalding hot to a shocking freezing cold without warning. There are many places that I can see outside by peeking through my wood paneling and in fact, you could easily get a peep show if while I took a shower if you stood on my porch and peeked through the crack by my window. The corrugated metal roofing makes my house an oven in the summer and a refrigerator in the winter; it will literally be cooler outside in the sun on a summer day or warmer in the shade on a winter day than in my house. The metal roof also makes for very loud rainstorms and hailstorms sound like my house is being torn apart. I’m not sure if it’s because of the constantly fluctuating electricity or just because my refrigerator is old, but it functions like the weather. In the summer it hardly stays cold enough to freeze ice and in the winter if freezes everything including my eggs. I don’t own a modern toilet and instead have my pozo ciego (latrine) about 20 meters behind my house. At night, it gets too dark to see inside the latrine so I have to use a flashlight. If I have to pee in the middle of the night, I just pee on my lawn. I seem to have constant ant invasion problems as if my entire foundation became a giant ant next. I also have more spiders living in my house than I care to count but I assume it’s in the three digits. I generally have electricity and running water, but it will go out sometimes (mostly when there is a storm but sometimes for no reason at all) and it will be out for an hour or a few hours, a day or a few days. I love my house.
Maybe it’s because it’s all my own and after having an absurd amount of roommates in a four year span, I finally have my own space with peace and quiet. And maybe it’s because outside of my precious shack I have over 100 trees on my property, tons of cool fruit trees, beautiful flowers, strange plants I have come to love, and fresh oregano, basil, and mint. But I think I love it mostly because of the amount of sweat, and tears, and blisters, and sadly blood and stitches into this house. If it’s a shack now then it was a weed-overgrown, trash pile of rubble before. Yes, I will curse when my feet touch the cement floor on winter days, wonder why God hates me when the electricity is out for three days and I can’t cook, and pray I don’t have heat stroke when I am in my house in the middle of the afternoon in the summer, but I still love every drafty, cobwebby, musty inch of this house.
I now only have eight more months left here. I guess one year and eight months, one house and zero roommates (other than the dog) is a good stab at permanence for me.
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