I was raised in Colombia, mostly in Medellín. In 1972, my folks bought a lovely old house on a mountainside about three miles from the edge of Medellín. Dad named it Casa Shalom. When we moved in, it was a very traditional Colombian home. It had a red tile roof, and the oldest part of the house (built in the 1920s, I believe) had adobe (packed mud) walls nearly two feet thick. The windows featured lovely wooden bars for security, interior wood shutters, and no glass. The sills were deep enough to sit in. There was a porch around three sides of the house. The interior featured a patio that served as an open-air living room with a palm tree in the middle. The bedrooms opened onto the patio area. The back part of the house included the maid's room, a large kitchen next to a big enclosed patio, the garage, and a caretaker's apartment. Most of the back part was built of glazed brick. Dad soon set to work remodeling the place. Some of the mud walls were replaced with brick. The mud from the demolished walls was used to level out the yard. Several modern bathrooms were built in an area that used to have a small dark bedroom and the single family bathroom. The front patio was covered with a roof, creating the biggest living room I have ever seen. I personally dug up the palm tree and replanted it in the front yard. A corner of the porch was enclosed to create my dad's study. A missionary friend built a fireplace in the living room. Electricity and plumbing were completely redone. A second floor was built over the back patio, with three bedrooms, my mom's study, a bathroom, and a sitting room. The caretaker's apartment was used as Dad's wood shop and for storage in our early years there. Later Dad built a second garage and a couple of apartments in that area. So during my junior high years, the family lived in a house under construction. By high school, we had a lovely home. It was huge, so that Dad could lead encounter groups (he's a counselor) and church groups. The new family bedrooms were upstairs, and had a spectacular view. I used to spend hours sitting on my bed and staring at the mountain across the valley. In the evenings, my favorite thing was to build a fire in the living room fireplace and sit in front of it to read. After we left for (boarding) high school, my brother and I would bring friends (and girlfriends) home for fall and spring breaks. We often hosted hilarious New Year's Eve parties with our favorite missionary friends: the Ericssons, the Ogans, the Voths. I left for college in the US in 1977. When I returned for a visit in 1979, my folks had turned most of the house into an orphanage. They kept it going until the mid-1980s. I spent six months at home in 1983, ostensibly working on a Master's thesis. My new adopted sisters had my old bedroom, my friend Apryl (who was volunteering at the orphanage) had my sister's old room, and I slept in the sitting room. If my folks were out, I would read my sisters their bedtime stories. My last time at Casa Shalom was August 1994, when I flew there from Costa Rica to pack up my folks' things. They were retiring back to the US, after 34 years in Colombia. Two of my sisters went to Colombia last spring and visited Casa Shalom. It is now a retirement home. Here are some pictures of its current condition. This is the street side of the old front part of the house. It looks pretty much as it always has, except for the addition of the mesh fence. There used to be a security gate at the left corner of this porch where the person is standing. You can see the wooden bars on the windows. The road is now paved. In the early 1970s, it was cobblestone. We used to hear farmers going by on horseback, and twice a day an old chiva bus would grind by. 
Here is the front entrance. The hurricane fence wasn't there in the old days, nor was the awning over the walkway. The little tile umbrella table is also a recent addition. 
Doña Julia, in the foreground on the entry steps, is the mother of a couple of our best friends in the neighborhood (Alvaro and Albeiro, alias Tata). Her lovely daughter Luz Dary was one of my brother's love interests. The lady in the background, Judith, worked for us when we lived in the jungle in the early 1960s, and came with us to Medellín. She spent several years as our maid, until the early 1970s. One of her sisters worked for us in the 1970s and 1980s. 
This is the view from the front porch, looking down toward Medellín. The tile umbrellas and the big school on the right are new. There used to be a tall chumbimba tree beyond the swingset, and an old fountain about where the bigger picnic structure is on the right. The replanted palm tree used to be at the bottom edge of the picture. 
This is looking back down the entry stairs and shows Judith and Cecilia, another of Doña Julia's daughters. When we lived here, there was an ancient rose bush on the left side of the stairs (about where you can see roses in the picture) that produced the loveliest black velvet roses I have ever seen. Judith planted a handful of pine trees in the early 1970s in the yard to the left. They grew really fast, and were 30-40 feet high by 1980. I don't know when they were removed. 
The side yard is a nice big rectangle. If you look closely, you can see the top edge of the retaining wall towards the right side of the picture. My brother Dan and I used to play soccer with Alvaro and Tata and the other neighborhood boys in the yard. (Tata always wanted to be goalie.) The school now blocks the former lovely view of the mountain across the valley. There once was a row of orange trees along the fence. 
Here is an outside view of the newer part of the house, which has two stories. Our bedrooms were the three upstairs windows. Mine was the middle one. My folks had the right corner bedroom, and my sister Mary Beth had the room to the left that now abuts the ell. I think my dad built the ell in the 1980s. The chimney and the window beside it are part of the big living room. The second window to the left of the chimney was our dining room. The girls are one of Judith's sisters and the daughter of another girl from the jungle who lived with us while she attended nursing school. 
This is the fireplace in the huge living room. We had a semicircle of sofa and easy chairs around it, and another circle of chairs to the right, so you could have two separate groups in the living room if you wanted. In cool weather, I would pull a rocker up to where I could rest my bare feet on the hearth right in front of the fire, and read Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries or Lord of the Rings and drink hot chocolate. 
This is the same room, slightly to the right of the fireplace. The other living room furniture arrangement was to the right of where the table is. Our piano stood against the wall where the round table now stands, and a really cool painting hung over it. The guy on the right is our old buddy Alvaro. The doorway behind his head opens to our dining room. I probably sanded and stained most of the wainscoting that you can see along the lower half of the wall. Miles and miles of the stuff. I've hated sanding ever since. 
This is the kitchen. When we lived here, the stove was a regular-size gas one against the wall where the lady is standing. There was no hood back then. We had two fridges, one where the chained one stands and one where the industrial one is shown (but it didn't stick into the room like that). Instead of whatever the structure is on the left, we had a long table down the middle of the kitchen. Over to the right were cabinets that ran along the wall from the near refrigerator, around the corner, across the back wall, and around the corner along the pantry wall to abut the far refrigerator. (Once when wasps were swarming in the kitchen, I sat up on the pantry roof with a vacuum cleaner and sucked up a bunch of them.) 
This area was originally the back patio. In my junior high and high school years, we had a ping-pong table here. We had a parrot that would stand in that window and make noise and nip at the cat as it came in and out. Later on the orphanage used this room for taking care of the kids. Now it's the dining room for the retirement home. You can see the staircase angling up in the top left of the photo. The door at the left edge was the other entrance to our dining room. 
Upstairs were the bedrooms. This was my folks' room: 
This is the view out of what was my sister's room. As you can see, the school has drastically changed the view. The yard retaining wall is clearly visible. Dad had a garden in the lower area for a while. The clothesline that runs next to the retaining wall was built when we first moved in. 
This is the room my brother and I shared, and that my little sisters used later. 
These cabinets are in the upstairs hallway. Dad built them. I used to spend parts of my Saturdays and Sunday afternoons helping him push wood through the radial arm saw, and of course with the never-ending job of sanding and staining. Note the elegant raised-panel doors and drawer fronts. 
This is my mom's study, to the right of the hallway shown above. Note the simpler cabinet doors. They were built a year or two earlier than the hall cabinets. There used to be upper shelves as well. Mom's desk was under the window. 
The upstairs bathroom had a tub, built specially for my mom. You can see it at the bottom of this picture, lined with mosaic tiles. That's my niece Rachel. 
And last of all, the upstairs sitting room, built over the garage. I think this room was built while I was in college. I stayed in it in 1983. It provided a more private living room for the family, since the downstairs was occupied by the orphanage. The floor is really cool broken terra cotta tile. In this photo you can also see the type of wood ceiling we had upstairs. 
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