Hello again everyone, I am going be switching up the theme
for the next probably three posts and will be talking about where and how I live. This will include everything from seeing into
my house to the surrounding delta around me.
I have mentioned these places before in some of the earlier posts, but
with this theme I hope to go into more detail.
First things first, let us start with where I really live,
sleep, eat, and do some of my works: my house and my compound. As you can see in the picture, my house relative
to some other Peace Corps countries is pretty nice. It has two bedrooms, a full kitchen, bathtub,
toilet, sink, pretty large living room, running water, electricity, and
internet hook-up. Also, all of my furniture
is taken care of by the District Aids Coordinating office and as you can see in some of the flickr pictures
not that bad. For instance, my bed is a
queen size and probably one of the nicer beds I have had in my life.
With all of this said, there are some things to get used to because
it is still different than what I am used to in the U.S. Take, for example, the bathroom. In the U.S. we are used to the toilet, sink,
and bathtub being all in one room. Here
in Botswana about every house I have been to the toilet, sink, and bathtub are
usually in separate locations. Like in
my house, as you can see in the pictures on flickr, the toilet and bathtub are
in their own separate small rooms and the “bathroom” sink is between the
two. That’s probably the biggest difference but
their other subtle ones too like here my whole house is made of concrete and
has a corrugated steel roof, which keeps thing cool in the winter and hot in
the summer.
So far though, I have really been comfortable in my
house. I do, on occasion, have to deal
with the water and/ or electricity not working for maybe a few hours or even
sometimes a few days, but you get used to that and prepare by having candles
and bottles of water stored away. In
fact, I actually enjoy when the electricity goes out sometimes because then the
whole village becomes dark and the sky at night is as clear as it would be if I
was camping.
Now that is just my house, but really I am not living in
just a house. No, I live on a compound
with about three to five other people living in separate living spaces that
drastically differ from one another. For
example, the structure closest to me on the right is just a one room thatched
roof hut made of clay. Yet, in this hut
my landlord’s son has a fridge, a T.V., a bed, and a hot-plate. The farther structure on my right is a little
bit bigger than the hut. It has three
rooms and one common space where the tenants share a hot-plate, fridge, and
T.V. Neither structure has a bathroom, so they use an outhouse at the far
corner of the compound (shown in flickr).
I mentioned in an earlier post the kids who were living here
but a few months ago they and their sister who was taking care of them moved to
another compound. Replacing them was a
group of guys working at the construction company updating the roads around
Gumare. There is one girlfriend who
stays with them and is home usually most of the day. This new group of people has been really nice
and we get along fine. In fact, it’s at
the point now where I feel safer because they are here. I even ask them to take of the dogs when I am
gone.
That’s pretty much it for the first chapter of Where and How
I Live, in the next I will focus more on Gumare as a whole. Hope everyone is doing well!
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