Where's Scott?

Arriving in Basud, Mabel’s village, we finally get a chance to see Mabel’s home. The family quickly unloads and gives us the peso tour. It’s a two bedroom, about 400 sq ft (half inside, half outside), and sits on 3ft stilts over the high tide (it’s in the tidal plane, but the area is overgrown with trees so the sea is clearly out of sight, even if it were daylight). It’s comprised mostly of split bamboo for the walls and floor which has the benefit of allowing the cool evening breeze to whisk through the house and up from below. Only Mabel’s parents and a few siblings live here, so it’s not too crowded, but it does look like it could use some love! One of our goals here is to repair this little fix’r’upper, and we can see it needs a lot of work! It looks a bit like a Dr. Suess house. Nothing’s square, and it leans decidedly back and to the left. As we slip off our sandles and walk in, Seb and I (fat gits that we are) start breaking through the floor and have to make quick moves to walk on the floor beams! The corregated steel roof has a number of gaping rust holes, and as we sit there, a piece of the wall conveniently falls off (probably for our benefit! ;).

It’s been arranged for us to stay in a friend’s house (for a nominal fee 😉 and it’s one of the few houses in town made of brick, and has a working (well, occassionally working) shower, which saves the town from some very smelly white men. The whole town is about 1/2 mile long along the main road, and actually has a few hundred feet of cement paving in the center. Chickens and dogs abound, and as we unpack past midnight, the roosters crow every few seconds; these guys don’t wait for dawn, anytime is a good time to crow. Our host has moved out of their bedroom to make room for Seb and Mabel (who get AC) and I’m in the next room (without, nice fan though!). The bathroom spots a number of large cockroaches, mosquitos and an interesting flush mechanism using a ladel and a bucket of water. We make a note to get some bug spray 😉