A 2-parter

Somebody said, early on, that the more our site placement resembles what we were used to in the States, the harder it will be for us to adjust. I find myself agreeing with this statement a great deal. [Note: I just finished the post, and am looking at it – the first bit is long, and if you get tired of it, just skip down to the horizontal line; read the last paragraph before the line, and then the rest of the stuff after]

My partner and I are living in an apartment together, just like last year. It’s about the same size, if not a bit larger. One superficial difference is that the national architectural style emphasizes walls that do NOT go all the way to the ceiling – this helps to allow for the free flow of air (the blessed “breeze”) through the house; since we’re on the top floor of a building, it’s build with a peaked roof, we have walls that go up to a normal height, and then basically a barn roof extending up over us. Other than this, and the fact that the building is a bit outdated – something I got to live in during university years anyway, not to mention that I grew up in an old farmhouse now pushing 100 years old – when we walk into our home, (and this is key) there aren’t many aesthetic discrepancies between life here and life in the U.S.

There are, however, deeper issues. We have a scheduled blackout once per week, for maintenance of the grid. “Scheduled” is a relative term; sometimes The Schedule blacks us out on Tuesday. Sometimes Wednesday. Or maybe Thursday. Whatever. Also, when big storms (mostly in the form of high winds) come through, the power goes down.

This would be less of an issue if the electricity (“current” as it’s referred to here, as in, “We’ve had Current for almost a year in this town”) weren’t integral to the water system.

Let me give a quick overview of our water. We have two hugungous (slightly larger than ginormous) tanks sitting 10’ from our building, elevated up a bit higher than us and connected to the building by a pipe. These tanks previously caught and stored rainwater. This is a somewhat tricky proposition, but then again it’s rainy season 8 months out of the year here. With the recent advent of Current to the area, the tanks have been covered over, so no more rainwater comes in – this is a mostly good thing, as sometimes birds fly overhead and, well, you get the point; or bugs fly in and die, etc. – and the tanks are now filled, twice a day, from the local water supply. Water is pumped up high into the tanks; we then get water due to the magic of gravity (they’re higher than we are by just a bit, and water flows downhill). Simple, huh?

Well, then you add in that there’s a regular blackout once a week. During the blackout, you can’t turn on the pump, so the next day we routinely run out of water. Then there are the unscheduled blackouts. Then there’s the weekend, when the guy that turns on the pump isn’t around as much, or maybe he’s sick, or has a function attend to elsewhere. Or there’s the fact that we’re the 3rd apartment in the building to be filled (out of 4), and the others below us have full showers and one even has a clotheswasher, so there’s more use on the line. This is no biggie for the other two apartments, but we’re at the very top, and the tanks are only a bit higher than us; once the tanks get about 1/2way empty, the water level and gravity no longer work to our advantage. The shower is first to go, but we bucket-bathe anyway. Then the kitchen sink drops offline; finally the bathroom sink, as the lowest outlet for water, tapers off. Everyone else, below us, happily uses til the tanks are empty. We resort to the Saveyer 5 gallon jug I set up and refill regularly, and pray that the tanks get refilled before Saveyer is done. Saveyer Jug, as in Save yer @$$, is pronounced “Savior”.

I know this is a bit wordy to get to the point that water is tricky here. And heaven knows, if our biggest complaint at the end of two years is irregular water flow, then we’ve done pretty well by our organization’s standards (recent groups had a variety of gastro-intestinal illnesses, worms, a hernia, pregnancy, assault, etc.). I mean, after all, we’re not volunteering to do work in London or Boston. But I just want you to imagine moving to a new place that is roughly similar in appearance to every apartment and house you’ve inhabited for the last 25 years of your life, if a bit of a fixer-upper. But it’s not the same. Electricity is tricky, water moreso, and you know every (and I mean EVERY) detail of your neighbors’ lives (and vice versa), because there are no full walls, and certainly no insulation. The closer it is to home in the States, the harder it is to adjust – definitely true.

It certainly is interesting. As with our “Stanley” hammer that I mentioned in the last post (R.I.P.), things often seem a certain way on the surface. It might take good hard use, or just time, but usually once you push down below the surface of the water, you can see how everything is just a little off from what it seemed at first. Sometimes it’s an easy thing to adjust to, but sometimes, and some things, and some people, you have a lot of investment in – financial, emotional, or otherwise – and finding out the hard way that things are different can be a jolt. Being in a new culture can be like reliving your early teen years (remember how fun those were?) or your first years on your own, all over again – you just get to live life, see what happens, and learn from your mistakes and mistaken assumptions.

--------------------------------

A last, slightly more amusing note – the language barrier here is at times hilarious and also absolutely mystifying. The two of us love that it’s *the two of us*, and that as a couple we get to go through most every interaction together. This increases our comprehension of conversations to about 70%, and one of us can usually cover when the other completely misses the conversational boat. The language here is a type of Creolese, which has a distinct and differentiated form in each Caribbean country, so knowing one will only help you slightly with any other, or with Lewsiana-talk. Basically, it’s faster and clipped, and a lot of grammar rules are dropped. Few prepositions (at, to, from), and there’s only one pronoun form used for each person – me he she we you they. Also, tenses are highly optional.

Rough examples (and remember, we’re not masters yet):
English Local Creolese
I went down there. Me go down deh.
Tell him to come downstairs. Tell he com bottom.
(Upstairs is “top”: Most buildings are only two levels, so there’s just Top and Bottom).
We went down there. Awbedee deh.

Yeah, you like that last one? Lots of times “we” becomes “Awbee”. I think it’s like “We’ll ALL BE doing …whatever”. And then “We’re going down” or “Let’s all go” becomes Awbedee. I spent a good 3 or 4 days trying to figure out who the heck this Awbee person was, and why I never met them, especially when they were always mentioned in conjunction with some group activity of which I was a part.

Oh, here’s one last one. When a local sees something demonstrated by some masterful person, snorts, and retorts “Ikoodadooda”, smile and agree. Of course they could have done that.