The House I Live In

“My House”

It sounds strange when I say my house, when it is not my house-it is a house that is school property, and is given to volunteers to live in, rent free. For some younger volunteers, it I their very first house.

My residence is a typical rural square-box, with 4 rooms, a courtyard, and 4 more detached rooms at the back of the courtyard. In the old days, and even now, some rooms in the detached building are the choo (latrine), the bathroom (hole for drainage), a store room, and the jikoni (kitchen where in the old days, charcoal was used, or maybe even wood). Nowadays, previous volunteers had made one room in the house as kitchen, one bedroom, one living room, and one guest room/office (just extra room). 

The courtyard is a 20 ft rectangle, with weeds. I put two bag planters, and a tiny garden, the vegetable seeds, morning glory and marigold seeds are not planted yet. I am waiting for the rains to come, and they are late.

Sparse furniture: Peace Corps requests only a lockable bedroom, a bed with mosquito net frame capability, a table and a chair, bug screens for windows, lockable front and back doors. Previous volunteers and now I have transformed the house into a more livable space.

Other teachers are asked to live on campus also, theirs are in more depressive conditions than my residence. One site mate’s parents from Dallas, Texas, came to visit his residence, and his mother told me the site mate could paint his walls blue, like his headmaster’s house to make it more bright.

By the way, the school is isolated, with no grocery store, or bank/money transfer service, or taxi cab. I see cows, goats, chickens grazing outside the courtyard every day, and an occasional pig.

the back buildings beyond courtyard,
left to right: rest room, bathroom, store room, old kitchen

My house on the left, 3 other houses
for teachers and admin people

bag planters with homemade tools to scoop soil,
the hoe was borrowed.

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campus dogs sunbathing in my back steps

The kitchen: the black wash basin is my sink,
the white bucket on the right is my "running water."
The green and white buckets are my water filtering system.

The gas jiko (stove) and the charcoal jiko

All the buckets in the kitchen are for my water,
which students are asked to fetch for teachers

One of my bookshelves in the living room.
Peace Corps gives us settle-in money to get some basic things we need for housekeeping 

The living room bottle decoration shelf and some wall decorations

Ah, the latrine restroom. Toilet paper on a bottle. Choo water in the yellow bucket is used water from washing clothes, dishes, face, etc.

Solar installation

It has been almost two and a half months, the last room still has problem with its individual switch to control the light bulb. This is the bane-plus two other things that were occupying my mind-so forget about studying Kiswahili…After all, how can I concentrate on night time studying with flashhlight? You see, the school only has electricity from a generator from 7:30-9:30 pm when school is in session. I cannot even enjoy reading a magazine or fiction at night without constantly worrying about draining my batteries.

No wires inside walls, all exposed wires like the switch (upper left by door)
to control light bulb inside the room.
On the wall by the front door is a homemade decoration.

My solar unit: panel on the roof, battery, green inverter on the bottom to convert dc to ac.
Note: electricity from school generator killed my plug to the cell phone power bank,
and blew the light bulb in my living room with a loud noise and smell--
scary to me because I was afraid it ruined my electronic equipment.

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I have been out of internet service for days. so just got it restored (buy data)-we trainees were not so familiar with all the complex technology systems and money transfer systems here in Tanzania. The feedback from some of us was taken by Peace Corps, and the training program will do better to explain the technology to the 2020 ED class of trainees.

If you think it is stark, it is not. The countryside is beautiful, really like Provence, France. I even see two small patches of golden sunflowers on my trips to banking town. Await for the flora and fauna segment to come.

Flowering tress all over campus. This one right outside my residence