Mi casa

I live in a house owned by the foundation I´m working for. By Dominican standards, it´s really nice. By European standards, it´s extremely basic.

These are great things about my house:

-5 minutes from the beach.

-Secure 

-Outdoor shaded area

-Basic facilities - shower, stove, washing machine (kind of, I´ll explain later), flushable toilet (well...more about that in a minute too).

-Lovely housemates that want to go out and do fun things

-A decent bedroom to myself

These things are kinda funny about my house:

-The washing machine. It´s outside, and has two drums. One is the washing part that is filled manually with a tap. It drains from a pipe in the bottom. Then you transfer everything to the other drum, which spins. Then you hang it up. 

-There is a patch of brown grass beside the fence that separates our garden from the house next door, which has a family of Haitians living in a concrete shed. The grass is brown because the little boy pees through the fence. We figure it´s not such a big deal. He doesn´t have a bathroom, where else is he going to pee?

- We have an outdoor shower and an indoor shower. The indoor shower has such low pressure there´s just no point. So we all shower outside. There is no hot water but it´s not necessary.

Our refreshing, high-pressure shower. Don´t worry Mom, there´s a modesty curtain (a bedsheet on a stick) we can pull across!

The only thing I don´t like is that our toilet, like almost all Dominican toilets, flushes but can´t take any toilet paper. ANY toilet paper. So everything goes into the bathroom bin. Which is kind of gross. So far, it´s been ok. But inevitably I´m going to get sick from food cleaned in the tap water (not drinkable) or something and then the toilet situation is gonna be unpleasant. But it´s like that all over the country, with the exception of some newer hotels. 

I was shown around Come Pan, the barrio where the locals live, and my house seems like a mansion in comparison to what I saw there. But that´s another post for another day, I have to go back and take more photos to do it justice. Other things I want to write about are food, the men, the women and the dogs. But all in good time.