Welcome Home!

The muffled ‘thud’ of the newspaper hitting my front door Monday morning last week, was the best thud I’d heard in a month. The hot shower I had soon after was the first shower I’d had in a month. Likewise, the pot of real drip coffee, which waited for me on the coffeemaker downstairs, was the first in a month.

I am a creature of (great) habit and I like a certain similarity to my mornings. You know, a paper or two, lots of coffee and time to read.

The only thing different from all the other Monday mornings in the big old scary house was the baby-pink and blue wool blanket I cuddled up in: it had come all the way from Lesotho, in Southern Africa.

Last Sunday I returned from volunteering at a newspaper there for a month, living at the home of one of the reporters, Mathapeli Ramonotsi.

Mathapeli’s house is built out of cinderblocks and covered with a tin roof.

The house has four bedrooms, a living room, a dining area, a small kitchen and a very nice west-facing porch – sounds pretty standard, doesn’t it?

But that’s about where any comparison to an Inland Northwest home ends.

There was no running water in the house when I moved in. The faucet was outside, 10 steps from the frontdoor.

For bathing, we’d heat water on the stove in a big old soup pot.

The house has no central heating and it gets down to freezing at night quite often during the winter. My shampoo only froze once while I was there.

In the kitchen there was no sink, but there was a small stove and a fridge.

An outhouse did what outhouses have done for generations.

Lying in bed, I’d look up at the ceiling and see the underside of the tin roof.

At night, I could hear the pigeons walk across the roof, making scratchy noises with their little feet. And when it rained I could hear every single drop. After a warm day, crickets, frogs and barking dogs would sing me to sleep. I could hear them as clearly as if I’d been sleeping in a tent.

I loved almost every minute of my trip and I would do it again in a heartbeat, but never has it felt better to come home.

Suddenly it doesn’t matter that a few of the tiles in my shower are held up by duct tape.

As long as there is hot, clean water coming from the showerhead you will not hear me complain.