Tag: The Interesting and the Amusing in My Daily Life Page 6 of 10

First of all, unrelated to my kitchen, this is the living room after the kids have cleaned it up.  Not quite as realistic, but probably how it would look if you came to visit!  

…and the dining room.

Okay, so onto my kitchen.  

I admit, I had some culture shock about this in the last three weeks.  I had forgotten how much time I spend in the kitchen.  

I spend

a

lot 

of 

time

in the kitchen.

In the States, people asked me all the time how we eat in Tanzania.  I would usually tell them that we eat similarly to how we eat in the States, but it’s just is a whole lot more work.  Yet, somehow I had forgotten how much work it really is.  

So.  Let me tell you about my life in the kitchen.

One side of my kitchen.  It’s not too different than what you are used to, except my sink is extremely small and my cupboards often have ants, cockroaches, and geckos in them–no matter how clean or how careful I am.  

and the other side of the kitchen.  

The fridge is small but I have a deep freezer.  I freeze almost anything I can.  This is because in our frequent power outages, I lose stuff in the fridge, but the freezer usually does okay for up to 12 hours without power.  I also try to bake in bulk.

My stove and oven are both gas, which is excellent because they are not affected by the electricity.  I buy gas in large canisters and hook them up to the stove, like you would for your barbecue.  

This is our water filter.  It ain’t a Brita.  We aren’t filtering for taste; we’re filtering for giardia and cholera.  

I was out today and stopped at a roadside stand for produce….which is one of my most favorite parts about living here.  Those black things in the back?  Giant avocados.  Mmmmm…..   All produce is amazing here, because it’s mostly homegrown. (But definitely not organic.  Pretty sure organic food is a first-world privilege.)

…aaaand this is how I bring home eggs.  Remarkably enough, they rarely break.  

This my pantry, and these are the ingredients I have to work with.  Packaged food is available but extremely expensive.  Cereal is about $8-$10 a box.  Lunch meat is $5 a package (and rather disgusting).  So we don’t buy those things.  No meals are quick and easy.  Everything, everything–breakfast, lunch, and dinner, has to be prepared.  But I have loved the challenge of learning to cook.  In our early years here, we ate a lot of omelets for dinner.  I’ve come a long way since then!  

For example, today we had oatmeal and zucchini bread for breakfast.  We finished the zucchini bread, so later today I will make about three large loaves of banana bread.  For lunch we had spaghetti with the sauce I had made last week and frozen.  

Dinner will be burritos.  I have the beans in the crock pot, and before dinner, I will shred the cheese, make the salsa and guacamole, and fry the meat.  It’s actually one of our easier meals because it just uses ground beef, instead of other meats that have to be cooked forever to be edible.  

Tortillas were made today by Esta.  This is Esta.  

(She has a terrific smile; I just can’t get her to smile for the camera.)

Esta is a fixture in my kitchen and our lives.  She has worked for me for seven years and is in our home 5 days a week.  She keeps me sane and allows me to have some ministry outside of my home.  She cleans the floors which are dirty every day from the open windows and dirt roads, she hangs my clothes out to dry and irons them, she makes tortillas and cuts up mangoes.  She is my friend and part of our family.  Like having a gardener live on our property, having a house worker is also expected here.  

You put us on your refrigerator; we put you on ours.  Keep those Christmas cards coming.  

And please, come hang out with me in my kitchen sometime!  

This has been our home for four years now (before our home assignment), which is the longest we’ve lived in any place since we’ve been married.  We have an excellent landlord, which has made living here to be blessing.  We’re about a half mile away from HOPAC, and 1 1/2 miles away from the Reach Tanzania training center, which is our new ministry.  It’s a great location and we are so thankful for this house.  

Our house (like all buildings) is made of concrete block.  We have wood ceilings and tiled floors.  

Living Room.  At Play Time, not We’re-Having-Guests-Over-Time

Door from the living room to the back of the house, where bedrooms are located

Master bedroom.  Mosquito nets are a necessity.

Master bathroom

Second bathroom

Kids’ room

Water heater.  This is turned on and off manually, and uses a lot of electricity.  I turn it on about 4:00 every day for a few hours, so that we can have hot water for showers.  We wash dishes and clothes in cold water only.

Garage which is now turned into toy/craft room.

Frodo, one of our Rhodesian Ridgebacks.  He doesn’t do much except lay on our porch, dropping engorged ticks everywhere.  You can guess how much I love that.  

Gate and driveway.

Our massively enormous yard.  Seriously, you could easily put one or two more houses in this yard.  It’s huge.   

Garbage pit on the far side of our yard.  All of our trash is thrown here and burned.  

Broken glass cemented into the tops of the walls around our house.

This is the tropics.  These are everywhere.  

Even better are all the other kinds of palms, like this one.

This little house is off to the side of ours, but inside our outside wall.  It is occupied by Paul, who is our gardener.  This is perfectly normal, even expected, in this country.  

Underneath our clotheslines is a huge underground water tank.  I think it holds something like 20,000 liters of water.  Water does not come in every day, so when it does come in, it gets stored in this tank.  That gives us a few weeks’ supply when the city water is cut off.  

Tomorrow I’ll show you the kitchen.  That’s a whole subject to itself.

The salon was now a video store.

Darn it.  I guess a lot can change in a year.

But I still had two little girls next to me with very big hair that needed to be braided.  A woman took pity on me as I was searching for the salon-now-video-store and pointed us in the direction of another salon.

I tried to repeat her directions back to her, and finally she told me to just follow her.  We walked through the dust, past piles of blackened trash and bare concrete block structures, over rocks and around puddles, dodging small children who always stop to stare at the white woman and her two brown children.  Finally she deposited me in front of the other salon.

I poked my head in.  Naomba kusuka watoto wangu?  I asked.  Will you please braid my children’s hair?  

Yes.  They welcomed us in.

The small room had two plastic chairs, two salon hair dryers, two large mirrors, and a shelf filled with hair products.  That was it.  On the wall was a poster of a little Asian girl with some sort of inspirational saying on it.  We took our shoes off outside, and they plopped my girls down on the floor and started working on their hair.

A guy came in with his arms full of women’s clothes on hangers.  Selling them.  He showed off each piece for the women to admire.  One woman took a bright fuchsia dress and tried it on on top of her clothes, prancing around for the others to see.  They haggled over the price and she bought it.  5000 shillings–about $3.00.

I know from experience that these type of clothes come from huge bundles of used clothing, shipped over from America, cast offs from thrift stores that get too much stuff.  I wondered about the American woman who donated that dress to charity; if only she knew that it ended up in a little salon in East Africa.

This is my life.  How do I even describe it to you?  I’ve been thinking so much about the women I met and became friends with in America this year.  I’ve been thinking about how I wish I could give them a glimpse into what this life is really like.

I could have described how earlier this morning, I went to the main grocery store in town–the one that sells imported products.  I could have told you how I the power went out while I was there, and how I waited in line for an hour because the store couldn’t get their power back-up system to work and thus couldn’t check anybody out.  Finally, in total frustration, my friend and I abandoned our carts in line and left the store.

I could have told you about how when I buy rice or beans, I always put them in the freezer overnight before I put them in the pantry, so that I kill all the bugs first.

I could have told you about the butcher shop where I buy meat, how it stinks to high heaven but he has the best prices and so I put up with it.

I loved my time with you, my American friends.  I’m going to try to give you a glimpse into this life here.  Hang with me while I attempt.