Home Away from Home

 I think I said I was going to post some pictures of the house we're staying in here in Gabs. Finally getting around to it. Above you see the front door. The dried, drooping plants on the porch roof are an experiment (not ours). I think they'd look great if they went the whole way across and were fresh.

Just left of the front door. You can's see it on this picture, but the garage door is now nice and clean (a fun activity Edwin and I did together one morning) and the garage is a bit emptier since I took half a dozen bags of paper, plastic, bottles and boxes to be recycled. You can see there are some brightly colored outdoor toys. Edwin's been making use of those most days.

Here's the view when standing near the garage door. You can see the motorized gate connected to brick and cement block walls. The walls surround the plot and they're topped by and electric fence. There is an alarm connected to the fence. It went off the other day. Apparently a lizard touched one of the wires. That was the end of the lizard. Soon after the alarm went off, some one from the security company came to check things out. So we know the system works. Walls and gates and electric fences are the norm around here. It was the same in South Africa (even more so!) and also in parts of Swaziland.

 This is a view to around the side of the garage. Those tires are basically little raised beds for growing vegetables. There's another one (not pictured) that has some basil growing in it. A gardener comes a couple times a week for a few hours to water the plants. It's the dry season here, so we haven't seen any rain since we've been here.

And further around the to the back of the house. The second door from the right is the kitchen door.

There is a small house behind our house. A young woman who is volunteering for a year at a local clinic lives there. The small house contains a bathroom and very small bedroom. We share the kitchen with her.

You can see there is a lot of gravel and dirt around here. Edwin loves the space to run around. And because it's all walled in, he can't go too far. Being in the city, and in a mostly enclosed space, I'm not really worried about snakes being outside, so I'm happy to open the doors and let Edwin explore and play and dig in the dirt to his heart's content. I think returning to our home with a tiny back yard is going to be quite a shock for Edwin.