And then...The New Home Owners.

We have officially moved out of our host family's mud hut and into our very own mud hut. The construction is mas o menos finished...one of our windows is nailed shut because the hinges aren't on yet, our little concrete sink's drain isn't finished so we use a 5 gallon bucket to catch the water and when it reaches it's capacity of dirty agua we throw it out the window...

Our first night in the house, after a delicious American dinner of garlic pasta and chorizo, Alex spotted our first scorpion in the house. He cut the tail off with his machete and the pinchers chased him around before he was able to completely kill it. And then...we saw it. A HUGE white tarantula, the size of a dinner plate, on the eave of our roof. Lauren screams and says we have to kill it. But we can't reach it with our machetes. Sooo Lauren goes to the neighbors to get a Panamanian that has experience in killing this giant dangerous spiders. They tell us to be careful because they jump. We stand there looking up at it as it creepily moves around debating what's the best way to kill it...when it disappears..
:bad words bad words: then Raul shows up and asks what's all the commotion about? We tell him there's a arana blanca and we lost it. He says there's probably a hole in the wall and it crawled inside. He leaves and comes back with a ladder. He climbs up to the hole and starts poking sticks in it to get the spider to come out. When it finally comes out its mad and Raul screams and almost falls off the ladder before slicing it with a machete. But it falls back into the hole. He quickly mixes up some more mud in the dark and fills the hole. Right now as I'm writing this there's still a dead tarantula in the wall of our house. Yay. Needless to say we're thankful for our mosquito net and we tucked it in extra tight that night.

As new home owners in Panama, the night times are full of challenges, but there are day time challenges too.

Day numero dos en la casa.

Theres all the daily things that seem simple, like doing laundry, showering, cleaning the house, watering the plants, cooking meals, and taking out the trash. But in Panama nothing is easy. For example, when you live in a mud hut, there's endless amounts of uh...mud. After multiple times of getting on our hands and knees with a brush and scrubbing the entire floor, we've barley made a dent, and when the water goes out it makes showering, cooking, doing laundry, and watering the plants pretty hard. Since there's no public waste system in the rural communities of Panama, taking out the trash has a different meaning. There's two options 1) burn it. (who likes the smell of burning trash near your house?) 2) dig a big ass whole and bury it. As you can see both are great environmental friendly ways to dispose of garbage. As it gets dark at 7'o clock and the water returns we can start cooking dinner. This is always fun with no electricity but it's great that there's two of us, one of us to cook, and one of us to patrol the house with a machete and can of Raid. As it turns out neither on of us has a solid understanding of how to prepare chicken in the campo, because we've always prepared chicken out of a nice little package cut into perfect pieces ready to go. So when we have a pound of campo chicken from la tienda. (a bloody rib cage with the breast and wing still attached) we are at a loss. Lauren could be heard saying " I need my daddy to show me how to clean this chicken." As we started to figure out the chicken and got it cooking, the smell attracted a mama dog looking for food. She just walked right in the house. Lauren and Alex having a soft spot in their hearts for animals, feed her later. During all of this Alex emptied a can of Raid on the invasion of over ten thousand ants. The rain forced them out of the ground and onto our walls. At first it was just little lines of them, but soon it turned into what looked like a six lane highway of ants.

Like usual were keeping our spirits high and laughing it all off. In truth were excited about our first house together in the jungle of Panama. We've finished our community analysis and at the end of October well have been in Panama for 6 months. It's time to start in on those projects and for people to come visit us! :)