Post 2 - 1949 Our first home in San Joaquin

The "house" we were to live in was situated on the central plaza of the town, the main street being quite grassy as the only traffic was ox-carts, horses and an occasional pushbike.  The building was occupied by a number of people, but our section was upstairs, a lofty barn-like room divided by a six-foot partition, a front verandah, and a large back verandah extending out a little towards the backyard to accommodate a kitchen and bathroom.  The two latter rooms were tiny shacks with bamboo sides - no extras, not a thing in them!

We soon learned that a bath consisted of a bucket of cold water from the well in the patio, a dipper made from the dried shell of a gourd, and a floor of slats to let the water run through to the patio underneath. Without the facility of our private bathroom, we would have had to use the one provided for all the occupants of the house - a palm-leaf structure in a corner of the patio, its sides reaching to about shoulder height, and no roof. 

The toilet was a rough palm-leaf enclosure in the patio and was shared by all who lived there. The low wooden seat was over a pit, the contents of which were almost level with the rim of the seat and a writhing mass of hundreds of huge cockroaches. 

I had not expected luxury, but this was almost too much for me!  My loving, caring husband soon invented a suitable kerosene-tin contraption in our own "bathroom", and under cover of darkness he emptied it into the communal toilet. Needless to say, we made sure that all water taken from the well in the patio for household use was well boiled.

On top of the wooden floor of the main room was a six-inch layer of hard dried mud, evidently the owner's idea of keeping the place cooler.  The walls had once been whitewashed!  Bats and cockroaches were in residence.

Two chairs and a table were loaned to us, besides those we had a hammock each and the primus.  The rest of our goods did not come by the cargo plane the day after our arrival as we had expected, and as it was only a fortnightly cargo service, we settled into living with what we had.

Juanita’s (daughter) reflections 2026

• They had already lived in Bolivia in a remote place in the high Andes - Totora 

• As Australians of their generation born prior to the 1920's, they knew how to rough it. (heritage of the Great Depression / WW2)

• They had done tropical medicine course which was very good training for living as well as basic medical skills

• Dad had learned bush skills when camping on the Hawkesbury with this father has a child and growing up in the  Australian bush around Eastwood - now an inner west suburb of Sydney

• A determination that this is what it was going to take to bring the gospel to these people.