While we were up at our house, Yella went off to forage for some lemons from one of our trees. Soon, I heard prolific profanity, screams of rage and other indications of extreme unrest.
Yella had stepped in some excrement...in her sandals...human excrement.
There are no construction toilets in Panama. It is the great out of doors or nothing at all. It seems that Yella had found the Panamanian construction bathroom...with her foot, fully exposed in a sandal. OOOOOOOOHHHH!!!!
My only comment: "how could you possibly like this place after that!"
To say we have had a series of set backs is simply an understatement. And, this one tops all of them. Remarkabley, Yella has been rolling with the punches really well. (She did dip down a bit during The Great Human Excrement caper.)
Last minute stress is the name of the game here.
Our shipped goods were arriving today at 9 am. We were going to put them in our house. The house has no doors yet but our builder promised to get the doors installed today.
Ya, right.
Last night, at 7 pm, our landlord suggested that we rent a storage unit and store our goods so we didn't have to risk putting them in our house. The risk of theft is too great when no one is living in the house. (Especially without doors!) Our house is a least 4 to 6 weeks away from being livable and that's living on electricity generated with a gasoline generator.
So the fire drilled started again. Why doesn't anyone have these good ideas a day or two before they are needed!
We start calling and making arrangements after 7 pm. Remarkably, everyone was willing to talk and is actually helpful even at this odd hour.
In spite of the stress, the day goes well.
The shipping people are ON TIME. Holy shit!
The storage people are great!
Everything is off loaded in less than an hour.
Just to make things a little more dicey, our builder calls and says the backhoe just arrived on site to dig the ditches for our road. This is a tricky task because Panamanians don't understand drainage very well so I had requested to be present when this was started.
Well, we are at the storage place and tied up for at least another hour and a half with travel. So we race out of the storage place to our house. When we arrived, all was well. Things were progressing nicely although slowly. Senor Carlos was no speed demon on the backhoe.
This is the way of it. When it rains it pours, etc. At least we were making progress with our stress.
Footnote: We checked with our builder in the late afternoon and he was no where near getting the doors built much less installed on the house.
2 comments:
I can relate to the shoe in shit story. When we were redoing the stucco siding on our house, one of the workers in the crew used our front yard as their toilet, and I'm not talking about taking a leak behind a tree. Our dog found his gift and of course rolled in it. Of course we did not discover the dogs new fragrance until he had run all through the house. Talk about mad, Lorrie almost ripped the guys a new one. He learned a few English words that day!
I remember you relating this story when it happened. At the time I thought oh well. But having seen what happens in flesh and blood, it turns out to have more impact.
My friend who has lived here for years, says just give them a shovel and demand that they dig a hole AND cover it. After all, every one has the need so you can't stop the event!
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