Easy or Hard
Things here feel upside down some times, maybe because we're actually standing on the bottom side of the world from where we used to be (wink, wink). Things that used to be easy seem very hard, and vice versa. Here are a couple examples...
I used to find grocery shopping hard. Especially just before we moved, I would wander the isles of Walmart, pregnant with 2 kids in my basket, pushing it slowly along for about an hour, take everything home, and unload it up the stairs into our apartment. I remember feeling exhausted each week I went shopping. Now, grocery shopping is easy. Every other day, I ask our house helper to go to the market for me. I tell her a short list of the things we are out of, and let her know she can buy whatever else she sees there that would be good to eat. The beautiful thing is that there is a limited amount of things she could buy, so I don't mind letting her pick, and then at home I fix whatever we have. If I find we want to eat something she didn't buy, no problem, we ride past the market every day, so I can just stop for a quick minute and pick up the things I need on my way home. Grocery shopping was never easier.
On the other hand, things that used to be simple like getting a good internet connection are much harder. This week we ran out of internet credit (kind of like buying phone credit on a pay as you go plan). James thought he would re-fill our Tigo wifi device so that we could try to download some books to the kids Kindles. There are two different companies with two different internet devices. The Tigo one requires you to go to their store (which is not necessarily on our way home) and give them the phone number to upload the money to. This is not an easy thing for people like us who may not even know what the phone number is. Turns out the number James gave them was wrong, and the credit was given to another number. He went home with a vague hope that they would be able to undo the mistake. We didn't have internet for a few more days before he went to the other internet provider to get credit on our Airtel account. It's not wifi, but it's more reliable, and so now we have internet again. It used to be so easy, we signed up once, and the internet was always on. Automatic payments and two year contracts are a thing of the past, at least for now.
These are just a couple of the many, many things that we used to find easy or difficult on the other side of the planet.
I used to find grocery shopping hard. Especially just before we moved, I would wander the isles of Walmart, pregnant with 2 kids in my basket, pushing it slowly along for about an hour, take everything home, and unload it up the stairs into our apartment. I remember feeling exhausted each week I went shopping. Now, grocery shopping is easy. Every other day, I ask our house helper to go to the market for me. I tell her a short list of the things we are out of, and let her know she can buy whatever else she sees there that would be good to eat. The beautiful thing is that there is a limited amount of things she could buy, so I don't mind letting her pick, and then at home I fix whatever we have. If I find we want to eat something she didn't buy, no problem, we ride past the market every day, so I can just stop for a quick minute and pick up the things I need on my way home. Grocery shopping was never easier.
On the other hand, things that used to be simple like getting a good internet connection are much harder. This week we ran out of internet credit (kind of like buying phone credit on a pay as you go plan). James thought he would re-fill our Tigo wifi device so that we could try to download some books to the kids Kindles. There are two different companies with two different internet devices. The Tigo one requires you to go to their store (which is not necessarily on our way home) and give them the phone number to upload the money to. This is not an easy thing for people like us who may not even know what the phone number is. Turns out the number James gave them was wrong, and the credit was given to another number. He went home with a vague hope that they would be able to undo the mistake. We didn't have internet for a few more days before he went to the other internet provider to get credit on our Airtel account. It's not wifi, but it's more reliable, and so now we have internet again. It used to be so easy, we signed up once, and the internet was always on. Automatic payments and two year contracts are a thing of the past, at least for now.
These are just a couple of the many, many things that we used to find easy or difficult on the other side of the planet.
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