Sunday, September 2, 2018

Little Adjustments to be Made

The conveniences in life have pretty much remained the same for me most places I go. I may have dealt with one or two of these things before but never all at once. We don't think about all the little things that we have in America that make life just a touch easier.

 

No dishwasher. This completely threw me for a loop. I honestly had expected to have a dishwasher (besides my own two hands). No one mentioned to me that there wouldn't be one so don't buy dishwasher soap for your consumables shipment. Yeah, I have two years worth coming with me. What else can you do with it?

While we're looking at the sink I'll mention that no one else in the world has a garbage disposal. They are the most convenient thing but only found in America (maybe Canada??). It is gross trying to catch all the food stuff in a strainer or mesh basket but I was a bit pampered with always having water just simply whisk food scraps away with the flip of a switch. In Taipei they had even invented disposable plastic netted baggie things to put in your drain so you could just throw the whole thing out. 



Monrovia does not have city water. The women go daily to a place (I'll learn more about this later and pass it on.), collect water for the day and carry it on their heads to their homes. I've learned that buildings like ours have a tank that is filled regularly from a large truck that comes by. Although they keep the tank and lines clean, we aren't supposed to drink the water from the tap. 


For our clean water supply we have a water distiller on the counter that continually fills up with water (and leaks on the counter) and somehow takes the bad stuff out. We drink it, clean fruits and veggies with it and cook with it. I suppose if I boiled the tap water long enough I could cook with it, but it's easier to just get it from the distiller.


While we're talking about not drinking the water, that means we can't brush our teeth with the water either. So we have a bottle of the distilled water by the sink along with a cup. When our stuff comes I have some great little pitchers that will be perfect for this use! It's hard to change habits at this point in life. I've caught myself several times bending over to rinse my mouth from the tap. 


We have 220v here so we use have to have a transformer to plug our electrical items into. We had them in Moscow as well. I found it surprising that Bogota and Taipei used the same standard electrical outlets that we have in America. It made life so much easier to not have wires and electrical strips running everywhere. Things that turn often don't do too well on transformers. Fingers crossed that we don't loose too many appliances this tour!


It's been a long time since I had the luxury of reaching into my freezer and grabbing a handful of ice without having to crack a tray and refill. An ice cube maker seems to be the norm at home but it's one of those things we've gotten used to doing without. 


Due to the high humidity in Monrovia we've been issued 4 dehumidifiers. We had them in Taipei as well, but our apartment must have been well built because I gave up using them all together. They didn't collect enough water to justify the electrical usage. On the other hand, we are emptying these buckets every single day.

Most electricity here is run from generators. There is some sort of city electricity that powers the street lamps, but I'm not sure if it's consistent or why we aren't tied into it. Each large building has a large generator (think semi truck container size) that powers it. As far as I can tell one week in, the electricity is consistent. There are many problems with this type of system including the cost to run them and the noise they produce. When I go out on the balcony all I can hear is the generators running. I'm sure it will turn into background noise at some point in time, but right now they are overwhelmingly loud. Another issue is at around 5:00 pm and sometime in the morning they switch from one generator to another so the power goes off for a minute. It doesn't affect most things that are plugged in because they just pop back on. Clocks on appliances are useless unless you want to reset them two times every day. I learned all this the hard way. I put a roast in the oven, went to exercise and do a few things expecting the house to smell delicious when I walked in. I was surprised to see the oven off and the roast not cooked at all. So much for dinner that night!

After a week of living here these things are becoming normal. In a month I won't even think about them, but at first it's a bit overwhelming to realize that all of these conveniences and more are things that I don't realize how easy I've had it.

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