Dear Jenny - September 28, 1991

September 28, 1991

Dear Jenny,

How are you? Did you get my last letter? We haven't gotten any mail yet, but Mom says it may be weeks before we get letters. I hope one is from you!

Ruth, Shelley, and Jessica took me exploring around the compound today. Our houses are all pretty close together. There isn't a street like in the States. It's just a dirt road all the way from the front gate back into where the houses are. Right now the road is awful because of the rainy season making potholes, but Jessica says it's not so bad in the dry season.

So first they took me around all the houses, which we've done before. But, like, I never knew the Truxtons had a little pool! It's like a cement wading pool. I wonder if the kids used to play in it when they were little. They're all too big now. Ryan is the youngest, and he's in 6th grade. They have a lot of pine trees in their yard, which is huge. We've played hide-and-seek in there a couple times. But we have to make sure not to trample the flowers. All the other houses have yards, too, but no one has fences. There's a wall around the whole compound, but that's it. That wall is weird because it has broken glass on the top of it--I guess to keep people from jumping over. But the girls showed me where there's no glass. They said sometime when there's a polo game, maybe we can climb up and watch. (I don't know what polo is, but one wall of our compound is up against the polo field.) There's a mango tree on this side and another one on the other side, and they said sometimes they climb over that way.

Some of the neighbors have chickens. We didn't get close, but I could hear them clucking. The girls told me that the other people who live in our row of apartments are Nigerian doctors or other medical people who work at the hospital. I'm sure I've met them but don't remember any of their names except someone named Mary.

You have to cross a tennis court (or go around it) to get to our new house from the others' houses. It's a duplex like our last apartment in L.A., but the houses are side-by-side instead of one on top of the other. Our neighbors are the Yohannas, and they're Nigerian. The dad is a doctor, and the mom is a nurse. Their little boy is a nightmare. He's a bit younger than us girls and teases us all the time. I don't know many of the other neighbors. Their kids don't play with us, and they don't go to Hillcrest. One of them has a dog named Bingo, like in the song. His ears are always bloody and chewed up, and there's flies around him all the time.

There's a big field away from all the houses, and on the other side is where the wrecked car is. It was a white VW bug, and it's all squashed up in the front. It's just sitting there, and weeds are growing around it and stuff. Shelley says the lady driving it was killed, and she was pregnant, and they have her baby in a jar in the lab in the hospital. Yuck. She said she'll take me to see it sometime, but I don't think I want to see it.

Near the wrecked car are a couple buildings that are like ghost buildings. There isn't any roof, just walls and empty windows. There's broken bits of wall and stuff on the ground, no furniture or anything. But it's quiet. And there's plants growing inside the buildings. It was super creepy.

Then we walked down to the hospital, but we didn't go into any buildings. It smells funny down there anyway.

We had to run home because it started to rain while we were at the hospital. Man, the rain here is really hard! One time it even hailed! There were little balls of ice on the grass, and the pounding on the roof was even louder than usual. I'd never seen hail before!

Mom is calling me to go set the table. Write back soon!

Love,
Sara

P.S. Dad says I can't go play in the field anymore or go down to the abandoned building. He says there could be snakes. The grass in the field is really tall, like past my knees. I don't want to get bitten by a snake, that's for sure.