Our Apartment in Camotan- The Outside

I will try to get pictures posted of our new place little by little, but thought I would start with the outside first.  We are renting an apartment.  It is a two story building.  We are renting the bottom floor and another single missionary lady is renting the top floor.  We feel like we brought the circus to town with our loud crew when we moved in, but so far she does not seem to mind (or at least it does not show, haha). 

We live behind the grey concrete wall and the green gate on the left is our entrance.  I love those flowers and mountain views.  We are happy to be back living in the mountains.  It was flat in the Peten so the mountain views remind us of being in and around Coban (which we love and miss).

a view from the gate entrance

Our apartment is shaped in a "U".  There is a sidewalk that goes all the way around and each room has a separate door that leads out to the sidewalk.  That was really the only thing I did not like about this place, but it has turned out not to be so bad.  We actually like the natural light and breeze of living with the doors and windows open.  We are on the bottom level.

sidewalk views

This area is usually filled with toys most of the time.

This is the courtyard area that is in the center of the property.  We do not have any grass but still plenty of area for Cruz to run and play.

view of our gate and security wall

It is a little strange living behind a wall again.  Before moving to Sayaxche we had only lived in gated, walled places with razor wire.  One of my main concerns about moving to Sayaxche was that most of the properties there do not have this.  It is more open living there.  It took me a little while to get comfortable with people just walking through our yard and walking right up to our screen door and looking into our house.  Over time we began to like it.  We enjoyed watching people walk up and down the road.   It forced us to open ourselves up to the locals.  We really got to know our neighbors because we were so visible to them everyday.  We never had to worry about our property while we were gone because our neighbors were so good to look after our place for us.  That does not happen often and we feel blessed to have been where we were.   Living behind walls has its advantages, but there are also advantages to living like the locals do.

more views of our wall and razor wire

We really like our new place.  It is clean and cozy.

And one last photo of a little boy who loves having his photo taken.  His new thing is to have me take his picture so he can look at it on my camera.  He always says "Cruz" when he sees himself.  This is him giving me a BIG "cheeeeze".  He's a hoot!