Our new house!!

We moved to our new house about 2 weeks ago, and are finally settled in.  It is so nice!! We are about a 2 minute walk from the back gate of campus and no hills and landslides!!!
This is the front of our house:

We live on the 1st floor and have a fenced in yard for Rascal. 
These are some of the amazing flowers that we have growing in our yard.

This is a pineapple bush, I guess is what you call it.  I never knew how pineapples grew until I came here.  The pineapple grows right on top and you cut the pineapple off at the bottom of the pineapple.  We have a couple of these, but this is the biggest one.

This is our avacado tree in our backyard.  The avacados here are green on the outside and are called avacado pears.  They taste just the same and are YUMMY!! The tree bears avacados once a year and they are in season now!

You will also notice our Caribbean clothes dryer!! We are fortunate enough to have a washing machine in our new house, but a dryer is truly a luxury here.  I have learned how to judge the weather by looking for the mountains. If you cannot see the mountain, it is going to rain, no matter how pretty and sunny it is at that very moment.  My landlord calls it the Caribbean weather forecast and it has been accurate so far for letting our clothes dry.
This is our guava tree. 

It bears fruit year round and we are getting ready to have a TON of guava.  Good thing my children love guava jelly!!!  All the little green balls will grow into guavas and turn yellow and yummy!!
We also have several coconut trees or palm trees in our back yard. 
My favorite find are these.........kanips.

They are a fruit and are a juicy little morsel of sweet and sour.  They taste like sweet-tarts to me.  You bite into them to open them and they have this juicy orange center.

 



Lesson's in Dominican Life - Water Heater

We have been here for 3 1/2 months and there are certain things about the US that I miss.  My water heater is one of them.  In Dominica, there is not "one" water heater that heats water for the entire house.  Water heaters are placed in the areas where hot water is desired, i.e. shower/bathtub. 

This is a picture of our shower with the water heater.  We have to flip a switch outside the tub that turns on the water heater.  The water is then directed through the water heater and comes out the shower head, usually hot.  It's kinda scary having your water for the shower running through an electrical device before it hits your body...

In our house, as most houses in Dominica, we only have water heaters in the bathrooms, not the kitchen.  I use a electric kettle to heat water to wash the dishes with.  They make soap especially for cold water, but I just can't bring myself to wash the dishes in cold water!!

The kids have started back to school and are really enjoying the school here.  This is a picture from their first day back.

There are moments when I wonder if we have done the right thing by moving here, so far away from family and friends, and then there are moments like last night when the beauty and awe take my breath away and I hear God's voice and know that we are where we are suppose to be.
This is the sunset from last night..........AMAZING!!

Landslide!!!!

On Sunday, we had gone to church and we were down on campus when the power went out.  I didn't really think much of it since we had gone without power for a while the previous day until one of my friends text me and asked if we were ok.  Apparently, there had been a landslide near our house that had taken out one of the major power poles.
Warren walked back up to our house and was able to see the landslide from campus. Of course, we are fine.  It started on the peak above our house and stopped about 200 yards from us.  A little too close for me, but thankfully, no one was hurt.  Here are some pictures.



 Our house is just below the white roof to the left. 

It's never boring here!! It rained very hard on Sunday night and Monday morning and I kept waking up thinking that I heard another landslide, when it was just torrential down pours.
Anyway, we are moving next Wednesday to a faculty house right next to campus, YAY!!! I will miss our amazing view, but we will only be about 1/4 of a mile from the beach and about a 2 minute walk from campus and farther away from potential landslides :)

Lessons in Dominican Life - #1 – Power

Purchasing electricity in Dominica is a fickle process.  It is vitally important for life down here and completely different from how you pay for power in the US.  We have to pre-purchase electricity here and we use it until it is gone.  We buy it at the grocery store, the convenience mart or various cafes that sell power.

Here is how it works.  We have this power box on the wall that tells us how many kilowatt hours we have remaining.  Here is our box.  See the smiley face – that means that we are good J

As I learned on Sunday night/Monday, when the kilowatt hours drop below 30, the box begins to alarm – a high pitched continuous beeping…….

Sunday night, we realized that we had dropped below 30 kilowatt hours and that the box was going to alarm all night until we could purchase more power on Monday.  Anyway, back to the process.  We have this handy dandy power card (see below) that identifies our power box. 

You present this card to the cashier at the grocery store, handy mart, etc…… and tell her that you want to purchase electricity.  She hands you a receipt with a 28 digit code on it and you come home, enter the code into the power box and taa-dah – power. 

Well on Monday morning, I stopped by the café on campus to purchase electricity, only to find out that the power company had sold too much electricity and was not able to produce as much as they had sold.  The stores were not allowed to sell power until 9:30am, when the power company could catch up and issue credits for purchase once again.  Weird – huh…… So, Ayden and I hung out in the grocery store (one of the air conditioned spots in town) until 9:30 when we stood in line to purchase power.

We buy about $300 EC (Eastern Caribbean dollars – which equals $115 US dollars) at the time and this lasts us for about a month.  Of course, this is without running the air conditioner.  We don’t usually run the air conditioner except for about 30 minutes in our bedroom and the kid’s bedroom right when we are going to bed because it is SOOOOO expensive.  There are families down here that run the air conditioner all the time and their power bill is about $500 US a month.

When the power companies do sell too much electricity and they can’t catch up, we have rolling blackouts where the cut the power supply to various sections of town for 4 hours at the time. Thankfully, this doesn’t happen very often and we have been lucky so far…..knock on wood.

Things are good here.  We are adapting to Caribbean life and getting ready to move into a new house close to campus.  The view from up high is amazing, but we have all fallen down the hill that we live on and have decided that we need to either live closer or buy a car.  Since buying a car is a fiasco here, we have opted to move closer.  We should be moving August 1^st and will be a 2 minute walk from campus.

We visited a new beach – Red Rock- last weekend and here are some pictures.  It was AMAZING!!

The invitation stands…… Come see us!!!              

Rainy days...

Today is a rainy, lazy, I don't want to do anything kind of day. A tropical wave is moving across the island, so watch out!!! Those waves develop into storms and hurricanes!!!! It's been so hot down here, the rain and wind is a nice break.
The kids are doing great.  This is their last week of school and then summer camp starts.  I have volunteered to help at camp and we are going on field trips every Wednesday to different parts of the island.  I am excited because I get to be a tourist and be with the kids at the same time.
Last week, I fell down the hill that leads up to our house.  It is a gravel road and my foot slipped and I did a split!! It was not graceful at all and it really hurt for about four days, but I am much better now.  We rented a Jeep for 4 days because I couldn't walk up and down the hill and we took advantage of the Jeep and went out last weekend. We went to Cabrit's National Park and to Purple Turtle Beach.  It was so much fun and we all wish now that we had a car!!
Cabrit's National Park sits at the bottom of Fort Shirley, which is a fort that sits on the corner of the island.  We only went to Cabrit's because Fort Shirley required climbing a hill. We will return later to do that.  Here are some pictures from Cabrit's.

We also went to Purple Turtle, which is a beach nearby. It was so much fun!! The kids had a blast and played with a family of little girls that were amazed by our water guns and the fact that I could take their picture and they could immediately see it.  They kept begging me to take their picture so they could see it, then they wanted to take my camera home with them!
The girls taught Grace how to climb a coconut tree where  rope swing had been tied.  She would swing out and drop in the ocean.  She was exhausted!!

Just a few pictures of us and the kids......

Week 2

We are getting settled into a daily routine here on the island and things are good!!  The kids are in school and enjoying it.  Warren and I walk the kids to school in the morning and he goes to work.  I meet with a fabulous group of spouses for various activities that includes yoga on Mondays, gym Tues, Wed and Thurs then snorkeling on Friday.
This is a picture of the kids school with the playground.  It's as big as the school itself.  This is new and one of the MAJOR improvements since last time.

We meet everyday at 12 noon at the school to feed the kids lunch.  The parents are responsible for providing lunch and the lunch break is from 12 to 1 and then the kids go back to school.  I usually make my daily grocery store trip after lunch and then head back to get the kids at 3.  We go to the pool or play on the playground almost every afternoon.

It is so nice being able to spend the weekends together and actually do things in the island.  We went to the beach this past Saturday and it was gorgeous.  This is the closest beach to us.  The sand is black sand on this particular beach, as is most beaches on the island.

This is the pier at the beach.  If you look closely, you can see Warren, Grace and Ayden on the end of the pier....

The flowers are absolutely beautiful on the island and are always in bloom.  Here are a few of my favorites (not sure what they are exactly)

This is the open air restaurant next to the beach.

A few pics of the family

And lastly, the gorgeous sunsets from our living room window