Amy Medina

I wash and reuse my zip-lock bags. Lots of times. According to past roommates (who shall remain nameless) and friends who now live in Long Beach (who shall remain nameless), this made me weird. Very weird.

But I was raised in Africa. You couldn’t buy zip-lock bags there. They were a luxury so you re-used them until they didn’t hold together anymore. So I did it in the States too—out of habit, I guess. Now I do it because I’m living in Africa again and I have to make my one box of bags last two years.

But this makes me Green, right? Now, I know I haven’t lived in the States for a while, but Green means Cool, right? Not weird? Definitely not weird.

Wash ‘em, stick ‘em on the wall to dry. Good as new.

As Grace would say, “Hip, Hip, Hooray!” The rains have come. Every day this week it has been raining, all day, every day. Tanzania has two seasons: the wet season and the dry season. Or you could call it the hot season and the hotter season. But this week, it has actually been cold! I mean, we’ve gotten down to a definite 73 degrees! Makes you want to snuggle up by the fire.

Rain makes the roads impossible and makes it virtually impossible to dry clothes. But I love the rain here! As I’ve mentioned before, we have no glass on our windows, only screens. So that means that I can hear, smell, “feel” the rain even while sitting in my house. And rain here has this lovely, tropical smell to it.

Hip, Hip, Hooray! The worst of the hot season is over. The next few months should be gorgeous.

Gil took these pictures with his cell phone from our car. We actually saw a guy with a canoe, giving people rides down the street on this day.

You may remember that in February I posted about the ever-growing cracks in the walls of our house.

The saga continues.

Some of the cracks got so bad that if you looked at them right at eye level, you could see directly through the wall to the room on the other side. So I finally told our landlord about it, and she had someone come and look at the walls.

So the solution that this builder, or engineer, or whoever he is came up with is that he needs to knock down all of the internal walls of the house, dig into the foundation, put a better foundation under the walls, and then rebuild the walls.

Uhhhh…. sure.

Oh, and could they do the work this summer?

Considering the fact that in the next 5 months we will have over 20 people living with us at different times, and during the summer only have 5 days when we DON’T have guests, I asked very politely if the work could wait until NEXT summer when we will be in the States.

Thankfully, the landlord agreed. At one point this summer, we will have 15 people in this house all at once. It will be hard enough having 15 people use 2 bathrooms, let alone two bathrooms that have no walls.

So this basically means that we will have to move everything out of the house next summer. Sigh. Not thrilled about that, and we considered looking for another house. But the truth is, we love this house. I doubt we’ll EVER find another house that meets our needs the way this one does. So, we put up with it.

Since the renovation is over a year away, I asked the landlord if she could have the cracks filled in for the time being. So this week there have been workers in my house. They have been knocking out the cement around the cracks, putting in reinforcers, and then filling them back in. I had a picture of the giant holes in my walls and the hallway filled with cement, but the picture got lost somewhere in cyberspace.

However, the worker’s solution in the bathroom wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, as the walls came out looking like this:

Hmmm…not exactly aesthetically pleasing….and not exactly what I asked them to do. So yesterday we agreed that they would take glossy white paint and cover up the cement. Sigh. Such is life. Hopefully at least now the people who use our bathroom won’t worry about the walls caving in on them.