A Unique Home in a Strange Land

It wasn't easy to pick the most unique place I've ever lived for Paul Henderson's contest. I have lived in a lot of places - Atlanta; New Orleans; Los Angeles; Tucson; Quibor and Porlamar, Venezuela; Fargo; Franklin & Ridgway, Pennsylvania; Toledo; Lubbock; Richland, Washington; Toronto; and Pueblo, Loveland and Fort Collins, Colorado. With the exception of Lubbock, they were all interesting and fun places to live, and I have fond memories of my times living in them.

I decided to write about Quibor, Venezuela, since it was perhaps the greatest challenge I've ever experienced from a move. I joined the Peace Corps in August, 1968 and after a rigorous 3 month training program, I was assigned to live in Quibor, a small high desert town in western Venezuela with a population of about 3,000, to work with an agricultural cooperative. There are literally hundreds of stories I could tell about those times, but this one is about my house.

This was the first time I had ever really experienced a culture different from my own. It was my first time being among people who were living at a subsistence level. And my Spanish was brand new, and even three months of immersion wasn't sufficient for fluency - my training was conducted in Mexican Spanish, but what I found on hitting the ground was similar to teaching someone English at Oxford (England, not Mississippi), and parachuting them into the hills of West Virginia - it took a while.

I was on my own in a strange world, and I needed somewhere to live. This task provided another first - experiencing the mind-boggling inefficiency of a corrupt and uncaring bureaucracy.  After the right connections were finally made, I eventually got the keys to a new house in a new neighborhood.

The house was part of a government housing program funded by the Alliance for Progress. It's purpose was to get Venezuelans out of their straw-roofed mud brick homes because the straw roofs provided habitat for kissing bugs, the vector for Chagas Disease, a debilitating and eventually fatal heart parasite that was endemic to the region. This was the same disease that killed Charles Darwin, contracted when he was traveling on the Beagle doing research for The Origin of Species.

The house was a simple one, a single level on a concrete slab, with three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom. It was constructed of concrete block and had a tile roof. The incoming plumbing was connected to to a water line - where the outgoing line went was anyone's guess - somewhere out into the desert and I didn't want to look for it. And while the house had a connection to the power line, there was no internal wiring, so that was my first job.

I'm pretty handy with a pair of wire cutters and electrical tape, but had no training or practical knowledge about how to wire a home. And I did it wrong. There's a difference between wiring in parallel or series - I still don't know what it is, but I know if you do it wrong, you can either have all of the lights on at the same time or all of them off. I eventually got it figured out with the help of a neighbor, but my wiring was definitely not up to code, and would have given our fine AR home inspector members a case of severe indigestion. It's a good thing the house wasn't really flammable.

The next task involved putting in a fence. The neighbors all thought that the fence should include the front, but I thought that would discourage visitors, so I just did the back. And I later learned that the lack of a front fence served as a welcome sign for the hundreds of goats who wondered through the neighborhood twice a day on their way to and from their job of creating more desert. They had no hesitation about walking into the house, checking everything out, and heading out back to see how the garden was doing. They were sweet and I liked them, but not in my house.

During the time I lived in Quibor, there were constant upgrades to the house. I installed hammock hooks in the walls; built a solar hot water heater out of paraffin, black dye and copper tubing; built screens for the windows to keep the bichos out; irrigated the garden; stained the concrete floor; and many others.

The floor project was an interesting one, and I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it in all of my neighbors homes. The floors were beautiful - they looked like the richest, deepest marble and once done, required no maintenance. Getting that finish was simple and cheap - every day for a couple of weeks, I would pour a thick coat of used motor oil on the floor, let it sit for a couple of hours, squeegee it up, and wipe it down with a towel. That's it. The transformation was amazing, but I haven't ever been able to convince Mary to try it.

My house in Quibor quickly became my home, and my neighbors became my friends. I was comfortable there, and my life was an interesting one, always full of discoveries and new adventures. And there was one huge and unexpected benefit - Quibor was on the eastern edge of a large desert, and the daily winds that kicked dust way up into the atmosphere created sunsets that were stunning. Life in the neighborhood would come to a standstill everyday as everyone came out to watch the show. Local legend has it that Simon Bolivar once said that it was worth losing a battle in Quibor just to see the sunsets. I wouldn't have argued with him.