Added tons of pictures to Picasa, including the much requested pictures of my house. Enjoy!
Speaking of my house, I think I'll spend this entire post bragging about my living conditions. Serious upgrade*. I think the only way to describe it would be if you think about what it would be like to go camping for more than two years, and then finally come home to consistent hot showers, light bulbs, glasses of iced coffee and a cold bowls of pasta salad. Some highlights**:
**This comfortable life could not be supported on my PC living allowance alone. I get a very very generous stipend from WFP when I travel out of town for overnight missions. Frankly I have more money than I know what to do with at this point. I feel a bit guilty sometimes, but then I remind myself that my house also basically serves as a free hotel/restaurant/computer lab for poor travelling PCVs so I'm not the only one getting spoiled!
Essentially the only thing about my current home life that at all resembles my past village life is that I still wash my clothes by hand. I have debated buying a washing machine, but so far I've been unable to rationalize the purchase. I do get some small sense of joy and accomplishment hand washing my clothes on Sunday mornings, hanging them outside to dry, and removing them from the line, all dried and fresh smelling in the afternoon. Also I do sleep on the same sheets and under the same mosquito net, so I suppose that's a small reminder of my former home. And I do probably spend the same amount of energy trying to keep my house clean, considering I live with a guy who I've never seen pick up a broom, his cat who likes to throw up and poop on the floor when said housemate is away, and any number of PCVs crashing at my house in a given week.
On a somewhat related side note...less than a year ago plastic soda bottles reached TZ. Previously there were only glass soda bottles that you had to return to the vendor (think Mexican cokes that are so trendy these days in Austin) that then get rebottled and redistributed. Soda is seriously everywhere; guaranteed you will find someone in the smallest village selling it. In fact, on my very first day in my village, I entered my house for the first time greeted by two soda bottles sitting on my one piece of furniture, a small table. My counterpart explained to me that they are called soda (that is also the "Kiswahili word") and one is called Coca-Cola and the other Fanta. It put a huge smile on my face, but I didn't have the heart to tell him that yes, I have heard of soda before and they are in fact produced by an American company. I once heard something about international development gurus who were fascinated by Coca-Cola's success for marketing and distributing their products. If relatively expensive soda has reached some of the most remote corners of earth, why haven't we figured out a good way to get clean drinking water or cheap bednets there? But anyways, I digress and the point is actually a very shallow one and that is that it seemed like a very sudden influx of plastic soda bottles (although most people still drink glass bottles because they are cheaper...700tsh compared to 1000tsh), both of Coca-Cola and Fanta orange. And then last month, literally within a span of one week's time, every little shop in town was stocked with plastic bottles of....drumroll please...COKE ZERO! Seriously, it's everywhere now and I'm in heaven. Oh how I've missed a good ice cold, calorie-free coke :) But actually, on a more serious note, it's a bit of a mixed blessing; there isn't exactly an anti-littering culture here so I do dread the increase of trash to the environment :(
This post turned much longer than I was intending, so I'll just end here with this little gem, a video I stumbled across today that one of the girls from my training class had put together for our COS conference. Not a week goes by that I don't try to pick up my phone to call one of these lovely friends, only to realize they're all (except for 4) back home in the good ol' USofA. Tanzania is not the same without them, and I'm especially missing them these last two weeks as I had to say goodbye to two more great friends, Mike and Mindy. They were also in my training class and extended with WFP, and I couldn't have asked for better people to live in Dodoma with. They finished their 6 month extension and are returning home to start graduate school and law school, respectively, at Duke. I miss them already!
Speaking of my house, I think I'll spend this entire post bragging about my living conditions. Serious upgrade*. I think the only way to describe it would be if you think about what it would be like to go camping for more than two years, and then finally come home to consistent hot showers, light bulbs, glasses of iced coffee and a cold bowls of pasta salad. Some highlights**:
- When I wake up in the middle of the night to go pee (too much iced coffee, after all...), I no longer have to put pants and shoes on, strap on my headlamp, unlock my door, go outside and brave the creepy night and all the bugs, bats, and rats that can entail.
- I no longer have to make the tough choice between using my precious water for drinking, bathing, or washing clothes; I can do all three as often as I like, with the only annoyance being to pay a water bill at the end of month. And I can also wash my hands (and dishes) whenever I want, under my kitchen sink that, thanks to an extra storage tank, never runs out of water. But the best improvement, BY FAR, that I've made to my house was installing a water heater. It's only 30 liters, but that gives me more than 5 minutes of hot showering every night and it is truly blissful! (My PCTZ besties, Katie and Kat, remember well the angriest I have ever been in Tanzania...it involved splurging on a nice hotel after a long day of travel, only to find a broken hot shower. Hot showers are very serious to me!)
- Now I'm functional past 7 pm everyday (used to be sun down = bedtime) so I'm sort of like a real person again. I do still go to bed around 9 every night, but hey, it's all baby steps in the right direction. Not having to do everything at night by headlamp or candles is so nice! As is never having to worry about my cell phone dying. Or attempting to conserve my ipod and laptop batteries for two weeks, but inevitably failing and spending the last few days media-less, before I could get to town to charge my electronics.
- I no longer have to spend an hour squatting outside, stoking a charcoal stove as preparation to cooking dinner. Or brave the smoke, fumes, and occasional explosions involved in cooking with kerosene. I have two propane burners now so I can have two dishes cooking at the same time which has been really nice. And on top of this, I bought an oven, so there's been many recent adventures in baking (and entirely too many pictures devoted to this). It was quite a whim decision and a bit of a splurge, but now I couldn't imagine cooking without it. Every Saturday we have "family dinner" at my house for the Dodoma PCVs and anyone travelling through town, so the oven has gotten great use so far! Buying kitchen gadgets has since become my real weakness...pressure cooker, meat grinder, casserole dish, cheese grater, pizza cutter...oh my!
- Leftovers, they are a true revelation! I remember hating leftover nights/weekend lunches as a kid ("ugh, can't we just go out of dinner!"), but now I am a convert singing their praises. Having a refrigerator means that I won't starve if I just don't feel like cooking some days. Because I can do this crazy thing where I cook more than one serving at a time, store what I don't eat in the fridge, and eat it again later in the week.
- Not to mention the sheer availability of fruits and veggies here that I could have only dreamed about in my village...carrots, bell peppers, hot peppers, leafy greens, cucumbers, cabbage, peas, avocados, apples, pineapple, grapes, cilantro, chives/green onions, and on very happy occasions, lettuce and green beans. Obviously most of these things are still seasonal, so it's not like shopping at an American supermarket (and Tanzanian market is about as far away from a supermarket as I can imagine), but variety rocks. Dodoma also has two safi dukas (fancy stores) where I can drop a pretty penny on things like butter, cheese, olives, granola, milk, yogurt, wine, etc. Tons of butchers and several "bakeries" also mean fresh meats and breads. I cooked with meat exactly twice in two years in my village, but am now cooking meat at least once a week these days. Hooray for protein!
**This comfortable life could not be supported on my PC living allowance alone. I get a very very generous stipend from WFP when I travel out of town for overnight missions. Frankly I have more money than I know what to do with at this point. I feel a bit guilty sometimes, but then I remind myself that my house also basically serves as a free hotel/restaurant/computer lab for poor travelling PCVs so I'm not the only one getting spoiled!
Essentially the only thing about my current home life that at all resembles my past village life is that I still wash my clothes by hand. I have debated buying a washing machine, but so far I've been unable to rationalize the purchase. I do get some small sense of joy and accomplishment hand washing my clothes on Sunday mornings, hanging them outside to dry, and removing them from the line, all dried and fresh smelling in the afternoon. Also I do sleep on the same sheets and under the same mosquito net, so I suppose that's a small reminder of my former home. And I do probably spend the same amount of energy trying to keep my house clean, considering I live with a guy who I've never seen pick up a broom, his cat who likes to throw up and poop on the floor when said housemate is away, and any number of PCVs crashing at my house in a given week.
On a somewhat related side note...less than a year ago plastic soda bottles reached TZ. Previously there were only glass soda bottles that you had to return to the vendor (think Mexican cokes that are so trendy these days in Austin) that then get rebottled and redistributed. Soda is seriously everywhere; guaranteed you will find someone in the smallest village selling it. In fact, on my very first day in my village, I entered my house for the first time greeted by two soda bottles sitting on my one piece of furniture, a small table. My counterpart explained to me that they are called soda (that is also the "Kiswahili word") and one is called Coca-Cola and the other Fanta. It put a huge smile on my face, but I didn't have the heart to tell him that yes, I have heard of soda before and they are in fact produced by an American company. I once heard something about international development gurus who were fascinated by Coca-Cola's success for marketing and distributing their products. If relatively expensive soda has reached some of the most remote corners of earth, why haven't we figured out a good way to get clean drinking water or cheap bednets there? But anyways, I digress and the point is actually a very shallow one and that is that it seemed like a very sudden influx of plastic soda bottles (although most people still drink glass bottles because they are cheaper...700tsh compared to 1000tsh), both of Coca-Cola and Fanta orange. And then last month, literally within a span of one week's time, every little shop in town was stocked with plastic bottles of....drumroll please...COKE ZERO! Seriously, it's everywhere now and I'm in heaven. Oh how I've missed a good ice cold, calorie-free coke :) But actually, on a more serious note, it's a bit of a mixed blessing; there isn't exactly an anti-littering culture here so I do dread the increase of trash to the environment :(
This post turned much longer than I was intending, so I'll just end here with this little gem, a video I stumbled across today that one of the girls from my training class had put together for our COS conference. Not a week goes by that I don't try to pick up my phone to call one of these lovely friends, only to realize they're all (except for 4) back home in the good ol' USofA. Tanzania is not the same without them, and I'm especially missing them these last two weeks as I had to say goodbye to two more great friends, Mike and Mindy. They were also in my training class and extended with WFP, and I couldn't have asked for better people to live in Dodoma with. They finished their 6 month extension and are returning home to start graduate school and law school, respectively, at Duke. I miss them already!
