Our task was to rebuild that house and try to make it a home- a place where we could rest after a day of hard work living overseas. But more often than not, it was just as much hard work making and keeping that house a place of refuge and comfortable to be in.
How so, you may ask…
First of all the plywood side had to be completely torn down and redone from foundation up. When it’s 110 outside, tearing down a house is hard work; filling the shower tank time after time to get cleaned up after 10 hours is even harder yet. The Water Guy had hired a local man to help with this project and he turned out to be a pretty difficult guy to deal with. The constant barrage of requests for pay advances proved to be quite wearing, as did trying to manage this gigantic project without most of his family nearby. If you’ll recall, I had left with the 2 youngest children and temporarily moved to Thailand to deliver our 5th child. So, instead of dealing with dust and no plumbing back in our “home” city, I was dealing with snakes and scorpions in the house, climbing into the backs of small pickup truck taxis 8 months pregnant to get to doctor’s appointments, earthquakes, and the lonliness of a separated family. My friends, that is hard work.
Eventually, about 3 weeks before NariLoo was born, The Water Guy and the 2 oldest joined us in Chiang Mai where we undertook the hard work of figuring out the paper work involved with a “foreign birth”. It involves a lot of running around to various departments getting certificates translated, notarized and signed; birth certificate, a certificate of foreign birth, visa for “overseas”, passport, and several more I’m forgetting. I recall that being even more stressful than the labor and delivery itself. Which was actually a bright spot amongst all else. I would easily choose Thailand again to have a child in.
Meanwhile, the deconstruction went on. As did the spring. The timetable to finish our new home was rather rapidly dwindling; by fall’s end we simply had to be done! Enter “the work crew”. A team of 6 men, not of our host culture, but from a neighboring country, rotated into our home over the next 4 months. At times all 6 would be there; at other times 2 or 3 would be with us. Let me explain what I mean by “with us”. When you hire a construction crew of this sort (basically the only people willing to do this kind of manual labor) you provide EVERYTHING for them. You are expected to feed, clothe, and house them for the duration of the project.
It looked something like this: Eventually, the 2 youngest children and I (one being 2 weeks old) made our way back to our host country where we were met with a camping situation for the rest of the summer. No toilet, no bathtub, no kitchen, and 6 men to daily cook 3 meals a day for. It was 110 degrees out most days, but that was not nearly the most difficult part to endure. One day, the migration police showed up threatening to take all of our workers to jail where they would eventually be deported and never allowed back in the country again. When we hired these precious men (all would be amazing treasures whom our family loved very much) we were faced with an unspeakable moral dilemma of paying a “fine” on their behalf or choosing for them a doomed life with no opportunity of finding work in their own country only a year after revolution had gripped their land. I don’t feel as if I can say what we chose here, but it was hard work making that kind of judgment- it was one that left us physically ill for days, if not weeks.
There would be more illness that summer, in the midst of all. Not an illness borne of stress, but rather one that racked bodies with pain and suffering. But that’s for another chapter on another day...
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