Our House on Mango Avenue

We now live at #10 Mango Avenue in the Barrio San Jose, Olinala. Yes, this is the “house on the hill.” We have a wonderful front porch, with hammock, and beautiful view of the town with mountains in the background. We have two bedrooms, a living room, dinning-room, kitchen and bathroom. There is room outside for our soon-to-be installed drip-irrigation garden and lots of space for the kids to run. We share this space with three huge mango trees, which bear more mangos than our neighbors can sell and eat. Mango season is from the end of March to the end of July.

Martin has donated a tremendous amount of care and sweat to making this space user friendly – such as installing copper pipes in the kitchen so we can have running water, installing more electrical outlets in the kitchen, putting up a roof outside to shade the south-side of the house and create an out-door storage space. He also installed a solar hot water system and fixed and connected the nearby water storage tank. We are also working on ways to collect rainwater from the roof. We are contemplating building a dry latrine as well.

Our home is on the edge of town. It takes us 5 minutes to ride bike to the MCC office and 7 minutes to ride bike to the boy’s school. (10 minutes to walk to the office and 15 minutes to walk to school.) 15 minutes to walk to the Z ocalo, which is the center of town.

We do the bulk of our food buying at the outdoor food market in the Zocalo on Sunday mornings. We buy all of our drinking water. A pick-up truck drives by every few days and picks up the empty containers and sells us full ones. Our neighbors share food with us once in a while. Today our neighbor brought us a huge papaya from his tree. Other people stop by who are selling tamales, or corn on the cob, or popsicles or a hot drink.

And we are learning to know more of our neighbors. Our immediate neighbors have a 4-year-old daughter that both our boys adore. When we can’t find our boys in our yard, we are remembering to check next door.

Know that each of you is welcome to our home on Mango Avenue. Nuestra casa es su casa. (Our house is your house).