“Write about a problem you had and how you solved it. Did you fix it yourself? Ask others for help? Who did you turn to for support? What was the resolution?"
One major problem that Katie and I had abroad was when we were having issues with showering at our house. From Day 1, our host mom, Encarna, had pulled out the packet from UPO, underlining the fact that water is limited in Spain and that we need to conserve, etc. For awhile, we were only taking 3 minute showers, if that, every other day because from what we had understood, Encarna told us that one of us could only shower per day. As if that wasn’t bad enough our hot water supply was limited, and it was still pretty chilly in our house to go without sufficient hot water, especially late at night or early in the morning. This got old, really fast.
One morning, a few weeks in to the semester, I woke up for school around 7am and needed to take a shower before class. However, I didn’t have ANY hot water that morning, and I just could not force myself to take a cold shower when our room was already only 62 degrees... so I went to class a.) without a shower and b.) extremely pissed off, which is not a good combination. When I got back from school that day, I decided that I had had enough; that was the last straw. I immediately emailed Jorge, the coordinator for international students at UPO, and told him about all of our issues. I was really frustrated with Encarna because I feel like she had to have known about the lack of hot water since she uses the water too. Anyway, Jorge emailed me back right away with no problem telling me that Katie and I can definitely take a shower everyday, and there should be no reason why we can’t have hot water. He told me that he talked to Encarna, and everything would be fixed right away.
Well, when Encarna got home that day, it was like the Tazmanian devil walked through the door. I don’t think she was very happy that I emailed Jorge because she was speaking so loud, so fast, and so stern. She told me that “she never said we couldn’t have a shower every day” which I think is still bogus because I was almost 99% sure that’s what she had originally said. I just didn’t know how to handle the problem, and it seemed like emailing Jorge was the best option because he explained everything a little better in English rather than having Encarna try to explain the same thing in Spanish, 100x faster. She was definitely offended that I didn’t talk directly to her about the issue at hand, but I’m just happy it got solved. It turned out that the gas that heats the water was so low and needed to be changed, in order to have steady heat instead of sporadic bursts, making for a very uncomfortable shower. Although it was really awkward for the rest of the day after our little scuffle, we fortunately haven’t had any trouble since, thank God!
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