Moving In The Rain

Tuesday started out with Melody getting her hair done by one of her students and the kids all working on their homework as usual.  After lunch, we had planned to go with Ken and Ruddy to visit Ruddy's mother.  His mom lives in a very small place with Ruddy's older brother, another lady and her two daughters.  The yard is made up of a single water tap, a couple of lean to shelters for storage and a kitchen, a wooden outhouse, and two very small rooms as the house.

We arrived to find that there was nobody home but her dog and her 5 puppies, a bunch of chickens and a couple of ducks.  You can see the outhouse and the kitchen in the picture below.

Ruddy went to the neighbors house to see if they knew where is mother had gone.  It turns out that she went a few blocks away to help a friend of hers.  We found the house a few blocks away, and quickly found out that they were moving.  Ken asked what was going on, and the family was not able to keep paying for their house, so they were having to move back out to the country to live with some other family members.  Ruddy's mother was there because she had given them some things to use, and she needed to pick them up before they left.

We carried all of Ruddy's mothers things to Ken's truck to move them back to her house.  She had given them a mattress made out of the plastic burlap bags that farms use for grain, which was stuffed with straw, and a very old propane oven along with a few other odds and ends.

We packed all of Ruddy's mothers things, and then we packed all of the family's belongings in the truck that was going to take them all up past Samai Pata in the mountains.  Their total family belongings was basically a straw mattress bed, a garbage bag full of their kitchen items, a small bookshelf, and a table and 4 chairs.  We had all their stuff moved onto the trucks in about 15 minutes.  Imagine packing all of your belongings on trucks in less than 15 minutes.

As we drove back with a full truck to Ruddy's mothers place (the boys and I were in the back of the truck holding stuff down), the rain started to really come down.  Normally, I look forward to the rain here because it cools me off for a few minutes, but in this case I didn't.  Here is why.  In Ruddy's moms yard, everything is dirt, when the rain comes down hard, everything turns to mud.  By the time we got back, there was two inches of slippery mud everywhere in her yard.  I chose a poor time to wear my Birkenstock sandals.

We got everything moved into their places, and went inside to talk.  The walls in the house were all cracked and the roof was lined with a tarp, to catch all the leaks.  She was very friendly and explained that the walls were cracked because the neighbor's son had taken his dads truck one night and crashed into the wall right against her bed.  She thought there was an earthquake and thought the place was going to collapse on her.  She laughed about it now, but you could tell it was serious at the time.  It was also another expense that she hasn't had the money to fix.

She explained that they have been trying to buy the property for the last 10 years on a purchase contract for $4000 USD.  They have about $1500 USD left to pay on the property, but now the owner wants a lump sum payment of $1000 right away.  If they can't come up with it, he is going to try to move them along and find another buyer or renter.

We left her with some knitted dish cloths and gave the two girls who live there each a stuffed animal.  They became the only toys they have.

Pretty sobering stuff, but they all still manage to smile.