Never a Dull Moment
Growing and learning in the everyday ups and downs
Hi, friends!
If you’re new to my blog, and interested in knowing why we left Canada 18 months ago, you can find our leaving Canada story here. I recently also met and interviewed a Salvadoran-Canadian couple for this blog, Finding a Refuge, who are moving back to their homeland, El Salvador, because they can see that Canada is no longer the free land it was 40 years ago when they moved there. Here is part 2 of that story as well.
**Sit back and relax with a coffee or something…this is a long one…with lots of pics…I hope you get a feel for our life here lately…the good…and the slightly chaotic 😅🤪
What a whirlwind few weeks it’s been! We had Tom’s parents here for almost a month recently. We celebrated our youngest daughter turning five, and then Easter. It was so fun to show them our country, taking them to lots of our favourite places, including the beautiful towns of Apaneca and Juayua, and walking the colourful, artsy streets of Ataco (see below). Up in the mountains, it was so refreshing to be cool in the evenings. We also ventured to the botanical gardens in San Salvador where we enjoyed the exotic trees and flowers, fed the fish, and met huge Señor Iguana (see above). Mostly we just spent lots of time here at home, surviving the heat with fans and air conditioning. Mummu and Pappa, grandma and grandpa (Finnish-style), brought the girls to the pool or the beach every morning, and enjoyed splashing around with them and watching them ride the waves on their boogie boards.
The last week they were here, I got pretty sick—head-throbbing, fever, chills, and awful body aches. Having them here to help out was such a blessing. I haven’t been so sick in years, and ended up having to stay in bed for several days. It took about a week longer to feel like my energy had finally returned. For awhile during my low-energy days, I wondered if I’d ever feel like myself again—do I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or something?! Needless to say, I’m so thankful to be feeling healthy once again!
Our oldest daughter, almost ten now, was in the car with Tom, coming home from dropping her grandparents off at the airport.
“Daddy, life in Canada was the same everyday. But here in El Salvador, everyday is an adventure!”
Tom and I sure know that to be true. There’s always at least one, if not five “exciting things” happening around here at the same time! If you don’t believe me, come visit.
In El Salvador there is quite an over-abundance of stray animals. And because most people don’t get their pets fixed, it’s become a huge problem here. We’ve had several stray cats in our yard since we moved close to the beach. Two of them come around daily begging for food. And since we have a very particular cat who won’t eat his food after it’s been in his bowl for an hour, we started donating his less worthy food to the strays. The two that come by everyday have been making it obvious that we might have even more cats to worry about in the near future🙀 So we decided it’s time to get them to the vet. We made an appointment—and then the fun began!
Did you know getting a feral cat into a tiny cage is way harder than you’d think?! We managed to get the multi-coloured male, now named “Luca” into our bathroom—using a laundry basket to capture him, and then maneuver him through the house. But once he was in the bathroom, Tom had quite the time with him, and I couldn’t believe the noise! Let’s just say there was a lot of fear and rage, and Tom was on the receiving end—and very grateful for his work gloves and long-sleeved hoody! Once Luca was in the cage, he was beyond stressed, panting with his tongue hanging out. Poor kitty had no idea what to think. But once we got him to the vet, they calmed him down, gave him some deworming meds, and a simple neutering surgery. He is back to play-fighting with our cat, Gatito, and running around with his other kitty friends.
Onto the next kitty—a black female who’s 3-6 months old, whom our girls named “Sunny.” When it came to catching her, she was incredibly evasive, getting away at the last second every time we tried to trap her. Finally, one Saturday morning, we put down two little piles of food, one for Luca and one for Sunny, and she was hungry, so we managed to trap her with the laundry basket. After a few hours at the vet, we picked her up, brought her home, and made the bathroom into her “cage” while she healed.
The vet had instructed us to keep her inside for a week and then bring her back to have her stitches removed. But she managed to outsmart us. Somehow she pushed the screen out of the tiny window that’s at least six feet up the wall, and went back to her life in the wild. We still see her everyday, but she’s onto us, and runs away whenever we come too close. We’re hopeful that we can somehow trap her again soon, so those stitches don’t become in-grown. This particular vet, AB Vet, is a local couple who are committed to helping the country decrease the number of strays.
We drove up to our property on Sunday afternoon and picked dozens of avocados and mangoes—it’s definitely that time of year now! Fruit picking might sound easy, but it wasn’t by any means. Even with our fruit picker that gives us an extra 10 feet or so, the trees are way too tall in some places. There’s beautiful fruit hanging just a few feet beyond where we can reach in many places. “Why not just get a ladder?” you might say. Well, we don’t have a storage shed on the property, let alone a roof rack on the car. Besides, we’re not sure how to set up a ladder on a sloping hillside. Tom climbed up into the mango tree that’s right next to our giant avocado tree. He held a branch to stabilize himself, while using the picker with his other hand. Not an easy feat. Each fruit was painstakingly picked and then considered precious.
Later, we resorted to using a five-gallon compost bucket for Tom to stand on, while I stabilized it—not easy on sloping land—and that’s how we managed to get a few more of our delicious fruits. But many more still remain, higher than we can reach, even with the helpful picker. We need to find a monkey-like person to climb up there and help us out!
A few weeks ago, I stopped by a local wood-working place on the side of the main highway. I was determined to get some real wood shelves—we’d already spent weeks waiting for someone else who’d fallen through. And so, here I was, and after a lot of back and forth with my limited Spanish, I had my “estantes” ordered. They would be made of local guanacaste wood. Guanacaste, also called “ear tree” because of its ear-shaped seed pods, is a huge hardwood tree that grows well in this heat. Its wood takes months to “cure” or dry enough to use. We have friends who had their counters and the beams in their Airbnb done with it, and it’s so beautiful, with all the contrasting colours and wood grains accented when it’s varnished.
They weren’t cheap—solid wood isn’t—but because it’s real, it lasts. I paid half the money down to “secure” my order. I wish I could say it all went smoothly and they were ready after the two weeks as promised. But the elderly man needed three time extensions in order to finish them. And when I stopped by to check the day before they were supposed to be ready, he’d misplaced the drawing he’d originally made up for my order, and forgotten what it was exactly that I wanted. Sigh…
When we finally went to get them the following week, I was ecstatic—they’re so beautiful! But unfortunately, they were just a couple inches too wide for our car trunk.
So, we asked the muchacho if he knew anyone around with a truck. Thankfully he did, and we were able to get them delivered—for the Gringo price, but delivered nonetheless ☺️ We are all excited to finally have a place to put our books and other items. Now instead of having boxes of games and piles of books randomly stacked around the house, we have a bit of order. I know that getting shelves made may seem like a minor thing, but often it feels like getting things done and finding reliable help is a lot harder here. Maybe that’s because we don’t have all the needed connections yet.
I wasn’t planning to bore you with the drama we’ve been experiencing with our downstairs toilet for the past two months. But this blog is about our real life—the ups AND the downs…so I have to paint a realistic picture, right?! It’s been a big headache, to say the least, but here’s the long-story short, haha…if there’s TMI here, we’re all human, right?! Don’t worry, this is the clean version! Every time we had even one guest over, we had to explain: “You can only go #1 in the downstairs bathroom.” 😝…NOT the conversation starter of anyone’s choice! But, since we like the rest of our house, we rolled with the punches. And, as a bonus, Tom and I learned a few more words in Spanish—like pipes, etc. 😅
The owners had tried to fix the problem early on, sending in a fix-it guy, and even had a new toilet installed several weeks ago, thinking that would help. It did—for less than one day…ugh! And then they had the septic tank emptied. No change. Finally, last week we had a real plumber come to see what the problem was. At first he said it was because the downstairs toilet doesn’t have the gravity that the upstairs one has. Hmm…I don’t buy that. I messaged the owner of the house, and she’d never had this issue before. She called the plumber to speak with him. Then her brother showed up. Next, a huge “snake” went down the pipe. “Hay un bloqueo en la esquina de la tubería,” the plumber said. Translation: “There’s a blockage in the corner of the pipe.”
Oh, good—FINALLY, after two months—an explanation! Then, the awful noise of chopping up the tile floor. And…sure enough…problem found!! Seems that when they did the original plumbing here, they put a “plug” on top of an opening in a pipe, but it wasn’t a proper plug, and so it didn’t last. Now the plumber found said “plug” inside the pipe, not allowing much of anything past, not even much water. After removing the plug, he pulled out a big chunk of dirt and some roots that had grown into the pipe. No wonder nothing could get through! Here’s a picture, with the weird dirt-looking plug in the foreground.
Ok, so please don’t stop reading my posts just because this story is gross! I write about REAL life stuff here😅 Thankfully, our hard-working plumber cleaned up this awful mess since I took this photo…and he even put new tiles over the hole in the bathroom floor. Oh, and the toilet isn’t in the shower anymore either—lol!
As you can tell our lives here are far from what some people might picture—sitting on beautiful sandy beaches sipping piña coladas (ok, I’m exaggerating) or having the life of our dreams in a tropical paradise. Just like you, wherever you are, life here has some drama—good, bad, and some even ugly, like that last story! But what would life be, if it was just smooth sailing all the time?! Would we be learning, building character, or getting stronger? I doubt it. And to be honest, deep down, I wouldn’t want life to be easy. I want to grow. And I want my kids to be challenged in ways that will make them stronger, kinder, and braver for what they will face down the road.
Keep digging deep, friends. God is working good things in you—especially if your life feels hard right now ❤️
Thanks for reading this blog! I appreciate each one of you so much, even if we’ve never officially met! ☺️
And a special thank-you to the anonymous Bitcoin donor a few weeks ago!
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Muchas gracias, amigos. ¡Nos vemos pronto! See you soon 😊
Don't worry about it being gross! Your blog is one of the few I faithfully read as it's so entertaining. Glad you all are doing well!
I love reading of your adventures in ES!