kitchen and air-shaft/rain sump
Besides finishing all the walls, floors and painting the front rooms’ ceiling. I am tearing out the entire ceiling of the dining room, kitchen, bathroom and storage room. These rooms are in the back and are under a low tin roof that gets as hot as a griddle and radiates the heat down into those rooms. When I ripped out the acoustic ceiling panels they disintegrated from past termite action and some of their wooden supports fell apart as well. I swear that all of the wood in this building has to go. Later on, Raul plans on building a third floor over this rear area, so the wood roof framing will indeed go, and good riddance. I am replacing the old press- board panels with 4X8 sheets of 1” and 2” thick foam insulation, the latter is for those places where the metal roof is very close to the ceiling.
I installed the storage room ceiling first and it looks much better; when I fill the cracks and paint, it will look more modern as well as be much cooler inside. We might just knock down all of the interior walls up front and leave the space completely open like a loft. Then there will be no new wall expense and we will get rid of the termites as well as let light shine and air flow throughout the 90 foot length of the unit. We desperately need to secure the rear storage room when we move all of our stuff there. I just don’t believe that the building is burglar- proof despite bars on the windows and iron barred doors with huge locks. We want to put an iron gate on the rear room and bars over a partial wall between this room and the kitchen. Security is serious business and if you take all precautions, then you are OK. I have plenty of work to do to get this place ready.
It rained today and I found only one leak in the whole building and it happened to fall right where our bedroom would be located. So we have to go up and fix it. Tavo is raring to go up; we could use some air vents up there too. So we will make a project of it soon. The rain was very heavy but lasted only 15 minutes, but it was still enough to fill up the sump that collects water from the gutters. The roof in back is higher on the outside edges and lower in the center (because of the higher buildings surrounding us). This allows rain water to flow inward to a 7’X 11’ air and light shaft that runs two stories down to the ground level. The drain at the bottom of this shaft was partially plugged so Tavo cleaned it out. He is game for anything.
Sudarshani had to go to Colón the other day but couldn’t get out of Panamá because of the bus-driver strike which prevented all travel for most people for one day. They were protesting the quickly rising cost of diesel fuel; it has risen from about $1.80/gallon to $2.05 over the last three months. I hope they made an impact on the price-setters, they sure made one on the little people who couldn’t go to work. Continuing with protests, the students from Instituto National, the vanguard of social action in this country, staged a march against the proposed changes to the Social Security system, called CSS. These are high school students, mind you, who are attracted to this school specifically for its activist tradition. Since the national office of the education ministry is in our neighborhood, in fact just a block down the street, we were able to see the final stage of the protests right from our balcony. There were several hundred uniformed students marching down the street and milling about the plaza carrying signs and chanting something. The TV news cameras were all there and some of the more articulate students were seen talking on TV all day and night.
Panamá seems to have followed their Uncle Sam into the quagmire of “borrowing from the SS trust fund” and soon will not be able to pay the CSS recipients. So, the new gov’t wants to raise the age of qualification for reception of payments, raise the rate of the tax, etc. There is no quick fix for this problem because the theft of the CSS funds has been going on for too long without redress. What the local politicians did not acknowledge is that the US gov’t could borrow from the Federal Reserve Bank whenever it ran out of money (the FED simply creates new dollars out of thin air—it’s called inflation). Panamá uses the US dollar for their currency but they can’t print dollars, so the USA’s perverse “SS fund borrowing” model is not appropriate for this country. There were obviously no financiers in the legislature, not that such knowledge would affect their avarice.
