The village comes to Mel

For the past few weeks, Sunday has been our day to take the dogs somewhere for an outing, and every week we’ve run into a group that is fascinated by Mel. This week, the outing came to Mel, bright and early, as a contingent of the neighbors appeared at the end of the driveway. The women and children who had been here had reported that we had a large, white, beautiful dog, so almost everybody who hadn’t yet seen him came for an introduction, along with relatives from San Antonio. Everybody wanted to know if he was an expensive dog. It was difficult to explain, in a mixture of Spanish and English, that being old and neutered he is essentially worthless to anyone but us. But, it was a good chance to meet the rest of the family, and we had plenty of offers for help.

Our first job on Sunday was to hook up the water. However, when Tom dug more away from the pipe from the road and took out the parts he’d purchased, he found that he’d purchased ¾ inch pipe and the pipe onto the property was 1 inch. We scrounged around under the cabins looking for pieces to create the necessary fittings, but even with all the scraps and pieces, we couldn’t find anything useful. So, we stood in the cabin, looked at our piles of stuff, and decided that the ubiquitous plastic grocery bags and duct tape would do. Tom chopped the pipe and cleaned it out, we stuck the hose next to it, wrapped it in the plastic bag, and wrapped the whole mess with duct tape. We turned the valve to let the water into the property, and it started dripping out the end of the hose by the camper – very, very slowly. As I sat in the ditch holding the pieces together and being eaten alive by bugs, Tom tried to straighten out the hose.

Just then, our neighbor from the other direction showed up, although he didn’t want to meet the dogs. He had walked by when the dogs were out meeting the other neighbors, and had gone away because he’s nervous around dogs. When he came back and saw what we were doing, he explained that we are the end of the line, and although the line runs up the hill to his property, there isn’t enough water pressure to get the water to him, and we just get a very slow drip. To make matters worse, the pipe had broken somewhere upline, so the poor water pressure was even poorer than usual, although it was expected to be fixed early in the week. So, I got some bug spray and continued to sit in the ditch holding the pieces together while it very slowly filled the camper tank.

While I did that, Tom got his new weed whacker running, and started clearing paths to the cabins. Bol, the uphill neighbor, is a licensed guide who knows the jungle, so he offered to work with us to tell us which trees should stay and which should go, and had given Tom enough info that Tom could get a good start. We explained our situation of not having yet officially purchased the property, and that we didn’t want to pay anyone until that happened, and Bol promised to help us when we are ready.

We spent the rest of the afternoon generally cleaning up the property, filling a few more garbage bags, sweeping out the second cabin, and doing more weed whacking, which drew an audience of admiring men when the family returned from church. One of the men, Damion, admired Tom’s “toy,” so we don’t think we’ll have any trouble finding willing workers when we need them since they’ll all be eager to play with our toys. We ran the generator for a few hours to cool the fridge and charge the battery, when it suddenly stopped running. Tom ran to look, and found that the clear plastic housing for the fuel filter had cracked, and most of a tank of diesel had run out onto the ground. We’re not sure if we feel worse about the toxic dump, or about the fact that diesel is about $3.40USD per gallon, and we’d just dumped three or four gallons into the dirt. Add that to the fact that the part couldn’t be replaced until Monday, so everything perishable in the fridge spoiled, and it seemed like a lot of waste because of a cheap little part. Maybe we should have saved the propane fridge, despite having to roll it periodically!