Home is Where You Hang Your Mosquito Net

By: Cindy Baker

Since I haven’t really explained much about it, I thought I would take this week’s blog entry to tell you a little bit about our Home Sweet Home.

As we have said before, our family lives in Lorakau Village where a Rural Training Center (RTC) is located. The house we live in is essentially part of the RTC and thus we rent it from the school for a whopping $50/month (you get what you pay for). Next door to our house is the RTC main classroom with our outside walls being about three feet apart back to back. Our house is made of full concrete block walls with a cement floor and tin roof (that has exactly 7 spots that leak when it rains). Its size is what we would guess to be about 13x18ft. But, that is only a rough estimate - we’ve never bothered to measure for accuracy!

Our house area is eqipped with a “bush toilet” (outhouse with no actual toilet…just a keyhole) and a “local shower”. Both located about 100ft. from the main house. The shower consists of 3.5 walls and a piece of burlap type cloth covering the open section. Unfortunatly, the cloth leaves much to be desired by way of privacy (it gapes on both sides) so we added a shower curtain, as well. Aaron and the girls like to use our solar shower bag for bathing (when it is warm enough to warrant it). However, I prefer the more primitive warm bucket-bath method myself. It is just more efficient, in my opinion!

The only door in the entire house is the front door. The inside of our house has 12 swing-out windows (only 7 of them actually open) and is divided pretty much evenly into two parts by a woven bamboo wall. The sleeping area has a bunkbed (expertly built by Aaron!) and mosquito nets for Kaela and Melia. It also contains Aaron’s and my 4-inch foam mattress double bed and mosquito net. In addition, I converted a corner of the room into a “school area” with our card table set up for Kaela and Melia to do their schoolwork. The other part of our house is the living area – which is made up of Aaron’s office stuff, my kitchen corner, our dining table and a “catch all” corner. We eat our meals at the small dining table that is really one of the tables/desks that we borrowed from the classroom next door. But, there is room enough for four of us to eat at it on our borrowed chairs, as well! In the morning we enjoy our breakfast of bread with coffee (Aaron and I) and hot cocoa (the girls) in our Starbucks coffee mugs (That I found in Port Vila - it was between Starbucks and Walgreens and I just liked the Starbucks mugs better! Sometimes I wonder how some things find their way to Vanuatu…).

We have one small solar panel on the roof of our house that runs three LED light strips and one nightlight. Two of the lights are in our kitchen/dining area and the other illuminates our sleeping area. It is surprising how much light those lights put out and once we finally had them installed we felt like we were in a “real” house! They are a blessing! Once we get our inverter from Vila we will also have enough power to charge our cell phones, computer, and portable DVD player. Right now we are piggy backing off the solar panel for the RTC to charge our electronics.

Our house isn’t really very big and it isn’t all that much to look at, but it is home to us for now. And we are content with it, inspite of its imperfections. It’s funny, right now I am reading “The Little House on the Prairie” series to the girl. I remember reading it when I was a child and thinking how neat it would be to live in a simple, small one-room house like that. And now, 20 some years later here I am, living in my simple, small one-room house. And I even have a patchwork quilt on my bed!