Our House is a Very, Very, Very Small House...

...with a water tank in the yard and a fence that's topped with barb.

Training's over and Carly and I are officially working as volunteers in the busy (for Paraguay, at least) college town of Santani. We even landed our own little house just 2k outside the center of town.

Locally known as the "casa con tanque" (tank house), our casita is home to the local water tower and has been unoccupied for as long as anyone around here can remember.

The good news is the nice folks in our barrio have agreed to let us live there rent-free for the next two years if we fix up the place. The bad news is the repair list goes as follows:

-fix roof
-construct patio
-replace windows
-slaughter a couple thousand spiders
-new toilet
-new paint job
-new doors
-remove a decades-worth of semi-burnt trash from the front yard
-install sink
-figure out what sort of animal(s) died in shower drain and remove
-cut waist-high grass in yard and trim bushes
-install ceiling fans
-fix busted electrical outlets
-buy all appliances and furnishings


We spent the majority of this week cleaning the yard. It was hard work but Carly made it a whole a lot easier after she somehow conned the neighborhood kids into thinking yard work with Norte Americanos would be fun.



On Friday, we had all 15 of our broken window panes replaced. Apparently some young hoodlum in town had been using our house as target practice for his slingshot before we got here. I'm really looking to forward to the first time I get to run out my front door in my underwear to chase some punk kids off my lawn with a rake.



We're actually going to try and fix the roof ourselves this week so we can get cracking on the inside of the house without getting rained on.

Also, sorry we've been slacking so much with the blog lately. Now that training is over we should have more free time post...or at least more time to come up with better excuses as to why we're still not blogging.