Transition difficulty #3: Domestic Staff (written on 8/22/12, posted after we did finally find live-in help)

OK, I know, difficulties about having “domestic staff” really doesn’t sound like something that anyone should be complaining about, but hear me out first! 

We had a wonderful part-time maid in Paraguay that started at our house the first Monday after we moved into it.  There were a few moments of difficulty (mostly medically related), but there were very few and she did a great job.  I was very grateful for her help and housekeeping skills (which I am somewhat lacking), especially with the dusty living conditions, the need to carefully clean the fruits and veggies, the lack of convenience foods and no dishwasher.

We had heard that there would be separate domestic staff housing on our property here in Zim and we were thinking that for security reasons we might want to have someone full time who lived on the property.  What we didn’t think about was the fact that usually this means that there is a whole family (or two if the housekeeper and gardener both have families) sharing the property.  The other thing that we didn’t realize was that we would be responsible for letting a night guard in and out at a set time every day (a time set by the Embassy, not by us).  So, until we do have someone living on the property, we (ok, so really, John) are basically stuck with an early morning every day and we are tied to the house every evening.

Therefore, the idea of a housekeeper and gardener who live on the property (ideally without too many kids) became more appealing and we began our search.  Most Americans with school-aged children try to arrive at post before the beginning of school and so by the time we arrived, the household staff of the people who left post had been scrambling to find work since May or June.  As you can imagine, the good ones get snatched quickly.  Since the urgent issue is to have someone here to let the guard in and out, I thought that getting a gardener was most important, since it is often his job.  So, here is our tale of trying to find household help:

We interviewed two gardeners and decided to proceed with the second as we liked him better and I was able to speak with his former employer and confirm his reference.  We’ll call him Jim.  We had originally found him when we interviewed his nephew’s wife (let’s call her Susie, married to Craig, a gardener) to be a housekeeper.  Susie and Craig had a job at a house together (good for them since they were married with a daughter) but the family they had found only needed a part-time housekeeper so Susie was looking for part-time work to complete her hours.  I thought this might be fine, if we could find a gardener to live here since we had only had part-time housekeeping in Paraguay and I thought it was plenty.

Craig came with Susie to her interview and at the end of the interview Craig said his uncle (Jim) was looking for work as a gardener (we had told him we were looking for one) and gave us his credentials.  They looked good and Jim’s family didn’t live with him in Harare, so we thought we’d interview him.  We liked him and a few days later decided to offer him the job and asked him to come back to go over the contract.  He did, and at the end of the discussion started with the “I have a little problem” (typical red flag!).  The story was that he had some high blood pressure due to the fact that his former employer hadn’t helped him line up work before leaving the country.  He wanted to rest in his village for a few days and if all went well he would still move in the next Sunday and start to work the next day.  But he also told us that Susie and Craig had decided that they wanted to both work for us full time.  Earlier, I had followed up on Susie’s former employers and found out that there were some issues, so I was sure that I did not want to hire her on a permanent full-time basis until I could get to the bottom of the issues.  So, we told Jim that we still weren’t sure what we would do about Susie, but we still wanted to go ahead with hiring him.  Since we don’t have a printer yet, we said we’d have the contract ready when he came back from the village.

The next day the girls came home from school with “Guess what?”  A friend of theirs who is part of another new family (the one whose daughter is in Arianna’s grade) had also interviewed Jim and he had moved his things into their house last Sunday (I think right before he came to our house to go over the contract)‼  John thought he ought to check out the story with the mom and sure enough, that’s what had happened.  Jim had also told them the whole story about high blood pressure and not being sure about starting work next week, but in the meantime he moved his things into their house.  Earlier in the day, Susie sent us a text saying she wanted to work for us full-time.  My guess is that Jim was trying to get us to hire Susie and Craig who probably liked us better than their current employer since Jim had two job offers for himself.  In my opinion that is no way to start off an employment situation, so, on to more interviews….

Meanwhile, I have managed to iron a few of John’s shirts (I think for the first time since we’ve been married).  The biggest problem with not having household help is that the Embassy expects that we have help here to let in all the maintenance people.  This is pretty much a daily occurrence, which for now makes me feel tied to the house, and although it gets better after the transition, there are still weekly deliveries that require someone to be home at random times.  There are quite a few other interesting parts to interacting with household help, but I think this saga is long enough!

Transition Difficulty #2: Transportation

Although many people say that driving in Harare is bad, so far it doesn’t seem any more difficult than Paraguay.  Of course it is left hand drive and that takes a bit of getting used to.  And the traffic lights are often out.  When they’re not they aren’t very bright so it’s hard to tell if they’re actually functioning at the moment.  But the drivers in general don’t seem too crazy.

What is super difficult is the availability of options when your car hasn’t arrived yet.  I already told the saga of our car rental for the first weekend that we were here.  Since the really old beat up vehicle cost about $70 a day we thought we’d try the taxi route for the second weekend of being here.  The security officer had said that they don’t allow us to use the public system (mini vans that are the local version of a bus system) as they are pretty dangerous (mostly because the drivers are crazy).  They also didn’t want us to use the taxis, but we didn’t feel like we had too many options for getting to church besides walking (which actually was an option to revisit the same church we went to the first week).

Sunday morning we called all 5 taxi numbers that I had gotten from the CLO (the Community Liaison Officer who helps people transition).  No one answered any of them.  So, we decided to change our clothes (to have better shoes for walking) and get out there and try to make it to church for most of the service (there was no way we’d make it on time).  Fortunately the girls didn’t moan and groan since they had seen us make an effort to get a taxi (when we lived in Costa Rica we walked pretty far to church almost every week, which was often a source of complaints).

We got out of our little dead end street (called a close here!) and a car that had just passed us stopped.  It was a Zimbabwean neighbor who asked where we were going.  It turns out he was going to check on one of his businesses close to the church we were going to before he headed out to his church which is 100 k out of the city.  So, not only did we not have to walk, we got to meet a neighbor!  We never met any of our neighbors in Paraguay, unless they were embassy families who lived in our area.

The head of US AID Zimbabwe happens to attend the same church we were visiting and after the service we got to meet her and her husband and daughter (John of course had met her, but not the rest of the family).  They invited us over for lunch after the service and then drove us home!  So that also worked out well and we enjoyed feeling God’s provision for our lives as we so often do.

I think someone went to bat at the embassy for us over transportation difficulties – maybe someone in John's office or our sponsor after they found out what had happened over the weekend – and we’ve since been told that we can use motor pool even on the weekends and off hours until our vehicles arrive.  It seems like they go back and forth on this policy and we happened to arrive at the wrong moment or just got the wrong information since I didn’t think it was an option. 

Not that motor pool is always reliable.  I had a pick-up scheduled for the middle school open house at HIS on Wednesday.  When the driver still hadn’t arrived at the start time I called to find out what was going on.  The answer I got was that they were running late, but no real reason for why, so who knows if they forgot, or if I’m just not very high on the priority list (it is after all a motor pool for work related travel), but I was pretty disappointed to arrive a half hour late to the open house. 

We’ve been told that the vehicles we ordered from Japan have arrived in Durban, South Africa and should be on their way soon.  Of course, who knows what soon means and we probably can’t receive them until our diplomatic papers are in order, so for the time being all we can do is be patient…  We actually bought two cars – a Honda CRV and a Honda Fit - sight unseen, used cars with steering wheels on the right hand side.  It was quite interesting to try to convince the woman at our bank that I really wanted to transfer that much money in a foreign internet transaction!  Check back to see how it all pans out.

Transition Difficulty #1: Internet (Written on Thursday, August 23rd)

John started researching internet options in Harare months ago.  And now we’ve been here for over two weeks and we still haven’t resolved how we are going to meet our internet needs.  There are many options (ADSL, WiMax, Dongle, and Fiber), but they are expensive and unreliable so it’s quite tricky to make a decision.  Part of what's tricky about it is that the service you end up with is affected by where you live.  So, just because someone else has a good solution, it doesn't necessarily mean it would be a good solution on our property.

To at least get up and running with something at home I went out and purchased a device called a dongle.  This inserts into a USB port in the computer and then uses the cell phone technology to access the internet.  I don’t understand this stuff very well, but I do know that I’ve been trying to be careful about how much uploading and downloading I’ve been doing and we went through $50 worth of service in a week.  No phone calls (we use our internet for US phone calls), no Youtube, no looking at news and still it costs a lot (it’s a pay for usage system). 

Obviously this won’t work in the long run, so we have gone over all the other options about a hundred times.  The local people seem to use ADSL but it uses the copper phone lines which haven’t been taken care of in years.  At first, it wasn’t even an option since we didn’t have a local phone line that worked.  The phone company actually got that functioning on Monday and so we thought we might go with ADSL since the start up costs are lower, but then we found out that we need to sign a one year contract.  Since we’re not confident that the service will be reliable we didn’t want to lock into that.

As I type, I’m supposed to be working on checking out the options for WiMax (for this they install a small tower at our house).  This is a service that most embassy families seem to use, but we’ve gotten two sets of information from the company that we think is best and I need to access the internet to find it and ask the rep about the differences.  Lo and behold, the dongle connection won’t work right now, so I am writing this little entry instead!  Hopefully we will get this resolved soon and I’ll be feeling like I’m fully back in touch with the wide world out there.

Saturday update:  Well, I did finally get to research that WiMax option and it turned out to be a disappointment (it had pretty big limitations for daytime usage).  So, we decided on going with fiber, which will take a little longer to install, but hopefully be a reliable, fast enough solution!  It will still be at least a week, maybe two, before I can post photos, but I’m glad that we at least made a decision.

Harare, Zimbabwe, Week One (warning: long post!)

Arriving in a country, indeed a continent, that one has never been to before and is planning on living in for four years is quite an experience.  When we travel for vacation there is a certain kind of energy that I am sure many are familiar with.  When we arrived in Zimbabwe it did not quite feel like that.  It feels a lot more like moving (which if you’ve done it, you know it’s difficult), with the added complications of adjusting to a new culture and not having most of your “stuff” for several months.

Having said all of that, our first week in Harare went about as well as could be expected.  One surprise was that we saw snow flying around while we were waiting for takeoff in Johannesburg.  Another new family that was arriving at post was actually delayed because of deicing later in the day.  Fortunately, that did not happen to us, and we pretty much arrived on time, with all of our luggage on Tuesday, August 7th.

We were greeted at the airport by our sponsor, and taken first to our new house and then later to the nearby grocery store.  Our sponsor had also stocked our house with some of the basics, so we only picked up a few things on that first trip.  Our first night we had the pleasure of losing electricity just as we sat down to eat!  Electricity outages are just about a daily occurrence here, but we are fortunate to have a generator on the property.  Apparently, there was some air in a line or something, but they sent someone out right away to fix it, so we were back in business before long.

Our house is dated, but pleasant, with a HUGE yard which is totally dried out at the moment.  I think that when I can post photos I’ll do a whole post on it, because water is another whole story…

On our first full day, the whole family went to the Embassy so that we could go through the security briefing and get our ID’s (so that I can go in and out of the Embassy easily).  We stayed so long that we ate lunch there (there’s a small cafeteria and the food was tasty) and did some more food shopping at the commissary.  The commissary had just received their shipment and the girls were impressed with the number of items available since this is a new experience for us (no commissary in Paraguay).  Then the motor pool driver dropped John off at the AID offices and the girls and I headed home.

That evening we went out to dinner with our sponsor and his family.  They have two high school aged boys and the kids all chatted together which was super helpful in getting the girls on the road to adjusting to school.  We ate a Chinese restaurant where my dish was great. 

On Thursday John went to work and the girls had their placement/entrance exams at Harare International School, more commonly known as HIS.  We also had a tour of the campus and the grounds are lovely.  We were particularly impressed with the signs posted around campus (plus a big map) which gave the girls more confidence that they’d be able to find their way around.  We never did feel like we knew where we were at the American School of Asuncion even though we spent a little bit of time there.

When we got back from HIS a young missionary that I had been in touch with about Harare stopped by our house.  She had already been super helpful about info on Harare and then offered to take us girls to her house on Friday morning to watch Olympics and use her internet.  We said “YES!” and were grateful for the chance to do so.  She and her husband have two adorable baby girls, one of whom was delivered in a home birth 5 weeks after their arrival in Zim!  Great family.

We had scheduled to rent a car here for the long holiday weekend (Monday and Tuesday were national holidays) and it was supposed to arrive on Friday evening.  The hour came and went with no car and then John started the process of trying to figure out how to get in touch with the people (apparently the phone exchange had changed and they didn’t bother to put the new one on the information he had recently received from the company).  When he finally did get in touch with them, they said there was still a problem with the door of the car (they had told him this in an earlier e-mail) and they weren’t sure if we’d want it!  They agreed to bring it by Saturday morning so we could have a look to see if we still wanted it….

Saturday was Arianna’s 15^th birthday so we planned to spend most of the day as a family celebrating her birthday and relaxing.  We had gotten our Wii hooked up on Friday afternoon.   The Wii was brand new and we hadn’t used it until we got here so that we’d have something entertaining upon our arrival.  It turned out to be a great plan as we all had fun playing it during the long holiday weekend.  After a delicious birthday breakfast of homemade cinnamon rolls (which Arianna had prepared the night before), our morning was a bit busy.  The car did arrive for our approval (it was old and not in good shape, but worked), and then the guy took it get it cleaned up before officially delivering it.  In the meantime, a local musician that I’d been in touch with stopped by with his teenage son and ended up taking me over to his office where he happened to have a spare cello that I could borrow.  This was great since I’m not sure when we will be able to get mine cleared through customs with our air freight and I was eager to get back to practicing.

We spent the afternoon doing some errands – one of which was trying to find pizza dough so that we could have homemade pizzas for Arianna’s birthday dinner.  I also made our traditional Macy birthday cake, but it didn’t turn out quite right.  The cake is frosted with whipped cream, and I had borrowed a blender to make it since I have very little kitchen equipment.  A friend of mine in Paraguay makes hers in the blender all the time, so I’m not sure if the problem was the fresh cream or using a blender, but when I went to frost the cake, the whipped cream (which looked perfectly fine up until this point), melted down the sides.  I quickly put it on as best as I could and threw it into the freezer with the hopes of keeping the cake together until it was time to serve it.  I wish I could post a picture, but that will have to wait until I have better internet service.

On Sunday morning we were able to visit a church that I had found through an internet search and the recommendations of the young missionary family here.  It has a nice racial mix and it turns out that a couple of HIS families attend.  Checking out churches is a bit of a challenge when we don’t have a car so I don’t know what we’ll be doing in future weeks.  On Sunday afternoon we were invited to a meal at one of John’s colleague’s house.  It was great because they are the sponsors of another new family whose daughter is also in 10^th grade.  The two girls hit it off really well and it went a long way in making Arianna feeling much more comfortable for her first day of school.

After we got home Abigail said that she really wanted to meet someone her age before school started.  We had been told that there was a movie day at the Marine House for the kids on Monday since it was a holiday.  I had the name of a mom of a 7^th grade girl that I’d been in touch with before our arrival and so I called her to see if her daughter was going to the movie day.  It turned out that she and another HIS 7^th grader would be there so we made plans to go.

On Monday morning we went over HIS to talk to the woman who started a Suzuki violin program at the school and show John the grounds of the school.  We met a few new people, one of whom turns out to be Arianna’s math and PE teacher.  We just had enough time to drop Arianna off at home (she didn’t want to go to the movie), but the water truck arrived as we were ready to leave (did I say that water would be another whole post?) so we got to the Marine House a bit late.

The 7^th grade girls were very friendly and the parents of the Embassy girl invited us to an open house that another family was hosting as a sort of back to school get together.  We went home to retrieve Arianna and headed back over to the same neighborhood as the Marine House.  There was a nice group of middle school girls at the party (one of whom was another new American 7^th grade girl) and Abigail felt more comfortable about her first day of school.

That just about gets us to the end of our first week.  On Tuesday morning John and I ran up to see if the internet café and the passport photo shop were open since we wanted to go to both, but they were closed for the holiday.  The grocery stores and restaurants all stay open, but not the small shops.  So we took the girls over to another set of shops, called Sam Levy Village, which is the closest thing that you get to a mall here in Zimbabwe.  It is more of an outdoor strip mall that has been added on to in various phases so it’s a bit difficult to figure out.  But a few of the food shops were open and we were able to find some parmesan cheese and shop at a great fruit and vegetable store (appropriately called Fruit and Veg!).  Tuesday afternoon we started some interviews for household help, but that’s another whole topic and really the beginning of our second week, so that’s all for this super long blog post.  Thanks for reading this far if you did!

Finally the falls!

In case you didn't know, there are some very famous falls called Iguazu Falls (Cataratas de Iguazu in Spanish and Foz de Iguazu in Portuguese) right near the border of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.  I had heard about these falls some 20+ years ago when I was on a youth orchestra tour in South America.  Well, for various reasons it took me a long time to organize a trip there, but last weekend we finally went.  

 Devil's Throat - the first sight that we went to see.

 The reason that these falls are so famous is that they go on forever.  I didn't really capture the sense of being surrounded by water that we felt while being there, but hopefully these give you a little bit of an idea.

 One of the reasons that it took a while to plan the trip was that I was determined to see both sides of the falls (Argentinian and Brazilian) after waiting so long to see them.  This involved two border crossings and getting visas for Brazil (we had gotten Argentinian visas before our arrival in Paraguay).  In Argentina, you walk around the falls, as you can see from the first seven photos.

On the Brazilian side you get more of a from the distance, panoramic view:

To further complicate our plans, we found out the first hotel we booked wasn't on the approved list of Paraguayan hotels, so a few days before we left we had to change hotels.  Then, we found out that it was supposed to rain two of our three days at the falls.  We changed plans AGAIN and, as you can see, we had beautiful weather.  However, we ended up seeing the Brazilian side on a Monday, when apparently they divert some of the water to the hydroelectric dams.  There was noticeably less water on Monday, but the shots below were taken on the low water day!  Some of the panoramic falls looked less full, but there was plenty of water at Devil's Throat.  And, interestingly, Arianna preferred the less full waterfalls, so even the lack of water was good in her opinion!

All in all, a great trip which I will long remember.

Cookies with the youth group girls

As we have spent more time at church, we have thought of ways to try to connect to various people.  In early December we had an end of the year celebration for the English classes that John and I (and some others) teach where the students (adults and kids) all decorated Christmas cookies.  It was so much fun that I thought it would be nice to have the teen girls over to our house to do some decorating too.

So, after we got settled back in the country in January, I decided it would be fun to decorate cookies for Valentine's Day.  John asked what we'd do with all the cookies, and someone (I think him) came up with the idea of passing them out to the people at church.  So, we picked the Saturday before Valentine's Day and invited the girls over.  There is a missionary at church who has worked a lot with the teens, so I asked her to come help.

The girls had fun decorating the cookies, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and watermelon and swimming in the pool.  Unfortunately, only a couple of them were able to be at church the next day to hand them out, but I think the people at church enjoyed receiving them.  And of course, we had fun sampling them the afternoon that we made them.

 Pouring the icing into bags

Decorating the cookies

 Teresa made some particularly fine cookies!

 Eating fruit!

Finished products!

Pool time!

 

Handing out cookies at church.

 

Mangoes!

Well, not too much has changed since I last posted - it's still hot!! and I'm still working on my Spanish class.  But I worked enough today that I thought I'd at least try to do a post (maybe two!).  This one on mangoes.  I love mangoes, so it has been a real thrill to see them growing here.  Unfortunately, the national mangoes are not really suitable for eating - they are small and the flesh is stringy.  But the "good" mangoes grow here just fine, too.  And once in a while, I'm lucky enough to get a bunch of them given to me.  This year, I even happened to be there when they were picked (with a mango picker - they are too high to reach by hand).  Look at this harvest:

Up at the Caballeria (what is that in English???), where Arianna takes horse back riding lessons, there are tons of trees.  Here are some photos I took several months ago - back in October, when they were not ripe yet:

 The trees themselves are beautiful.

 But look at that fruit!

 Leftover pits from last year's mangoes

 I thought that it was pretty impressive to see all that fruit!

And I love this grove of the mango trees.  This place is in Asuncion!

Ok, one more mango tale before I close.  We've been spending some time with a teen in our church and one Sunday afternoon when the season was still going on she was at our house.  I proudly told her how much I paid for some mangoes on the counter - they were about 50-70 cents a pound.  She looked at me incredulously and said (in Spanish, of course) - "You bought mangoes??" and started laughing hysterically (which she is prone to do anyway).  It was so outside of her world to pay for something that just grows so freely here.  

Unfortunately, the mango season is over and they are back up to $3-4 a pound (imports from Brazil).  Happily, I froze a large quantity to put in our smoothies that we eat on a regular basis.