I want to add a few things to the post Sylvia and Lily wrote about our house. We have a very nice large house and we feel pretty fortunate to have such great accommodations while in Dar. There are many things about our house that are similar to our house back in Decorah, which helped the transition to this new place. These include:

• living spaces large enough to accommodate our 10 students for dinner, game nights and class
• a kitchen with a fridge, microwave and stove
• a large bathroom with a washing machine
• 4 bedrooms! We use 2 as bedrooms, one as an office and one as storage

But there are a few differences, too.

For example, we hang our laundry outside in Decorah, but we never have this problem.

 

We have a large back yard (which is rare in Dar!). And although our yard in Decorah is much bigger, we don’t have adorable mongooses running around there.

In Iowa, we have a better system for disposing of our trash. This pile is at the edge of our yard so that when we look at the evening sunset, we see our garbage. Sometimes we take our bags to a cement container down the road, but often, our garbage is taken to this pile by our housekeeper, Agatha. (By the way, that’s another difference between here and there – no housekeeper!!)

As Sylvia and Lily pointed out, we have bars on our windows and doors. In Iowa, we don’t even have keys to lock our doors. Here, we have to lock all doors every time we leave. We have guards that stay here 24/7. All the houses on our street have bars and most have guards, too. We are very aware of theft in this neighborhood and take necessary precautions.

Other differences without photos:

• We sleep under mosquito nets every night.
• There are geckos living in the house that eat mosquitos! And, they are adorable. We have a big resident living behind a book shelf. We’ve named him Gary Jerry Jeffery Jeremy Gecko.
• We have running water but it is rain water which comes from a big catchment basin. We have to pump our water from the basin up to a another container on the top of the house. We frequently run out of water so we have to open the pipe valve and flip on the electric pump for a few minutes.
• We don’t drink the water out of the faucet unless we boil the water first.
• When we want hot water, we have to turn on an electric water heater which then heats a tank with water for our showers (no hot water in the kitchen – we use boiled water from the hot pot).
• Occasional power outages.
• Cooking on a combo gas and electric stove (2 electric and 2 gas burners).
• No source of heat other than the sun. 🙂
• The windows are made of long glass horizontal rectangles that swivel open to allow for lots of air flow.
• Like in Malta, we have 240 outlets, and each individual outlet can turn off or on above the plug in.

Overall, we like this house and we have made it our home while in Dar. When we leave for a day or weekend, we always comment how nice it is to be back home. 🙂