When we lived in the United States, some of the everyday, mundane things we did were the same as what we do here. We went to the store to shop for food, make breakfast, lunch, and dinner, do laundry, talk to our neighbors, clean the house, go on walks, take out the trash, and all of the other million things that you do every given day, every week, every month of your life. No matter where you go, you fall into a routine, and that routine to you is somewhat boring. Thinking about it, there are real differences in how we do those mundane things in the US and here.
For example, in the US we walked 1 block to get to a County Market grocery store where we could pretty much find whatever we wanted to eat that day, from any type of ethnic food (Indian, Chinese, Italian, etc.), a refrigerated fruits and veggies section that wrapped around the store, a freezer section with hundreds of options of ice cream, a bakery with chocolate cake, and rows upon rows of cereal. We brought bags with us and carried back whatever we bought for the day to our house. You can find many of the same mega grocery stores here, but really only in larger cities. In our site, we walk to get to two grocery stores both with limited veggie selections, dried goods, and one or two refrigerator sections, but we also have a few panaderias for breads or cake, a terrific heladeria for ice cream, or we take a bus to get to the store in the next bigger town, which also has a farmer's market. Here producers offer their goods at your door. For example, people sell
eggs from the trunk of their car. Those local vendors are sometimes
the best quality, service, and price, but it's definitely not a one stop
shop here! If you are lucky enough to have fruit trees, which we don't, it's only a matter of exchanging with neighbors or asking owners if you can climb their trees! Much of the time, due to limited availability increasing the prices of foods beyond our budget, our food variety is limited to pastas, beans, rice, breads, sauces, and canned vegetables. We always buy as few ingredients as we can, and make them last as long as we can. Much like in the States, we carry bags with us and carry all of our purchases back to our house, but this time those purchases need to last us for 8-15 days and we walk 2 kilometers uphill to get home! Forget something? Run next door or up or down the hill to a little pulperia or ask a neighbor for it, much like in the US.
Making food here is similar to the US. There we cooked on the stovetop or used our oven. Here cooking consists of our one pan on an individual electric burner here. Or using the rice cooker or hot water pot in unique ways, like making bread in the rice cooker or cooking noodles in the hot water pot. Through donations from our community, we have both a full-sized refigerator and microwave, which is highly unusual for volunteers here, and we use both daily. With all of the similarities, cooking here is a time intensive process. In our town, Moms stay home during the morning hours to cook breakfast for their families, while cleaning the house and doing the laundry...all by hand. Everything takes a little more time than expected. Immediately after breakfast is done, preparations for lunch start. Everything needs cleaned, chopped, cooked, mixed, seasoned. At times, pressure cookers are used to help with the workload. We make simple meals to have more time to work with our community and sometimes use our few ingredients in interesting ways. For example, breakfast most days consists of coffee and bread with sour cream (natilla). We love it when our kind community members teach us how to make traditional dishes like empanadas, bring us food like banana bread, or invite us into their homes to share a meal.
Laundry is in and of itself one of the things that both of us hate doing here! We are very lucky that the community once again provided us a washing machine. In that sense, it's the same as the US. The difference is that the machines here are semi-automatic, possibly due to the culture that housework is done by hand. Instead of fully automatic system, that is probably more expensive and harder to fix when it breaks too, there is a washer section that spins the water slowly over the clothes and a separate centrifuge section that squeezes water out of the clothes. You rinse and ring your clothes by hand in between those two steps. If you need to wash out a stain, you use a bar soap and scrub! If the washer breaks down, as ours has done, you wash everything by hand in a sink, scrubbing, rinsing, and wringing as much as you can, and missing the semi-automatic function of the washer! If the centrifuge shocks you as you reach into it and breaks down, as ours has done, your clothes are all wrung by hand and take 2-3 days longer to dry. We dry our clothes in the sun on clotheslines and clothespins, much like I did in the US growing up. This system of a solar dryer works well in the dry season, but sometimes it is difficult to get anything dried in the rainy season or you're constantly putting your clothes back out and running if you think that it may rain to take your clothes in. An invention is hanging clothes in your home from that crisscross the room or hanging bamboo poles horizontally, as we have done, which doubles as closet space and clothes drying racks!
Talking to our neighbors is much easier here because we live so close to so many wonderful people! Leaving your door open allows you to say hi to everyone who passes by on the sidewalk in front of our house, which is also the main road in town. Often our neighbors and friends invite us in for cafecito (afternoon coffee) or to spend time with them. In the States, we would wave at neighbors or say hi to those that you knew well, but for the most part you live separately, coming home from a long day of work or school to your spouse or your family, cook dinner, and fall asleep. Communicating with the rest of our family (parents, sisters, or brothers) was almost always over the phone and on holidays in person. Lunch was always eaten apart from your family at work or school. Cleaning the house is much easier here too, because we live in a much smaller apartment and all of the surfaces are concrete or tile, so it's a simple matter of dusting, sweeping, or mopping. However, cleaning supplies are much more limited and all of the water is cold, so there is no sterilizing surfaces or dishes. Here, trash and recycling pickup is on two different days and consists of one truck for the whole town, so it's interesting to see how big the pile gets as the truck rolls through. Men stand on top of the pile to help it get under all of the power lines. In the US, a truck drives through on one day and you have two different garbage cans, one for trash and the other for recycling. The truck compresses the trash as the drivers pick it up and its usually one truck for a neighborhood, which gives you an idea of how much trash we generated in the US from all of our food packaging. Some people also still burn their trash here, one practice we would love to stop. Some people also burn their trash in the US. Another difference is the lack of a ceiling in some homes here, including ours, or walls that fully meet the ceiling to seal the home. We also have a mesh covering over a metal grating where windows would be, so our home is very hope to the environment. Most days we see beautiful butterflies, interesting insects, and mountains of geckos without ever leaving our room! We are also constantly walking here, so we don't feel the need to go out of our way to take walks like we did in the States. Living in a mountainous area is also unique for us and beautiful, but we do miss sunsets!
So as you can see, the mundane things of life here are different and the same in so many ways.
