Looking through American eyes

I'm going to have a housemate! We need lots of help at the deaf school, and she is coming to be a volunteer this year. She will do work for which it is very difficult to find qualified Dominicans.

But where will she stay? I looked through the two bedrooms which are possibilities. One is my office, and full of office stuff, of course. The second is basically a warehouse for school materials that we cannot keep at the school all the time for space reasons. So they go back and forth as needed.

The more I look at them through American eyes, the more I'm afraid she will be horrified and immediately want to find another place. Both rooms have water damage and peeling paint. And the color of paint is a sort of royal blue. It's a very inexpensive paint, and basically makes the rooms look like a cheap bar. There is not a lot of point to repainting, because as soon as the apt. above, currently vacant, gets rented again, the water damage will continue. Oh, and the mold that appears on all the wooden doors, and various other surfaces in the house...I forgot about that. In a word, it's all pretty ugly. It's not a healthy place to live because of the vermin.

There's a rat--yes, a rat---that runs around here at night. Correction: it's probably a family, or maybe even a tribe of rats. But I've never seen more than one at a time, at least. There are cockroaches, although not huge amounts. With no screens on the window, it is easy for rats and roaches to get in.

The electricity is off about fifty percent of the time, though we do have car batteries and an inverter that will at least power the lights and other things that aren't heavy users of electricity.

But what can I do? This is the way I live, and this is the way my neighbors live. Peeling paint, leaky roofs, rats, and roaches are not such a big deal. We take it all in stride, as a normal part of this Dominican Life.