mi casa

A little entry about the house where I´m staying. It´s about a 1-minute walk from school, and maybe 7 minutes to the parque central, the centre of town. The house has a solid metal gate, or maybe more like a garage door, which completely closes the front of the house with no windows. This is closed at night, but open during the day. Inside that, there is a little tienda (shop) with mostly candies, behind bars which protect the wares because it is (almost always?) unstaffed. There are a lot of these little tiendas, most with someone at the counter, so I doubt many people stop here and push the buzzer for service. Behind the tienda and the metal door beside it, there is a large curtain which gives the rest of the house privacy from the street. Behind the curtain is a large living, eating, and working space, long but fairly narrow. In this space are 2 sewing machines and 3 handmade wooden looms which the family uses for their livelihood, making traditional colourful, patterned mayan fabrics and products from these fabrics which may be less traditional, like pillowcases and handbags. The loom is a remarkable machine, and they´re very good at using them. I never understood how fabric was woven before seeing these machines, but perhaps that´s not a topic of general interest. Next to the looms is a dinner table, doors on the opposite side to the chicken coop, kitchen, bathroom, and their bedrooms. Appearing somewhat out of place between the dinner table and the bathroom door is a magazine photo of nearly nude white woman in lingerie. Further back is my bedroom, the washing sinks, and a stairway with no ceiling going to the roof. So the house is completely open to outside air, and the air is always fresh inside. During the rainy season the rain would fill the stairway, so their must be a drain inside somewhere. During the day, light pours in through the openings and through the translucent plastic roofing, and no lights are needed. There are a few fluorescent lights to dimly light the place at night. The floors and walls are concrete, but the walls are painted different and cheerful colours. There are plants everywhere. They have a few caged canaries who sing during the day, neighborhood dogs who tend to bark in the evening but not so much after 9 or 10, and chickens who start making a racket around 5am, 1.5 hours before sunrise. There is some sort of Christian festival happening right now, although I forget the name, so every evening there are lots of bombas (fireworks). I have a lovely little room, colourful, bright, a comfortable size with a couch, single bed, desk, some shelves for storing my clothes and miscellany, and a fluorescent light for reading, writing, or working at night. The decorations are an odd combination of landscape photos, a christian calendar, an ad for some American transport truck, and a sombrero. I have a single bed which is much more comfortable now that I figured out to fold one cover in half for more warmth, and flip the mattress over so this one rogue spring isn´t poking me any more. We only have running water from the afternoon to the evening, so lunch is the time for a shower if I want one. When the water runs out, we flush the toilet by pouring in a bucket of water from some basins they fill up while there´s water. I´m not sure yet if they´re on a water grid which turns off, or if they have a holding tank which is refilled daily and emptied again by usage and by the leaky toilet. In the house live two indigenous* grandparents Feliza and Alberto, their son Manuel, and another guy who works here during the day. I will write more about them later, but have to run now to dinner. *personas indigenas, or indigenous persons, seem to be the common term in use here.