My house

I got pretty lucky in terms of housing, all things considered. My house here at site is quite small, composed of 2 rooms, the whole thing maybe 20 feet by 10 feet. But it was built new just for me, and the Peace Corps provided me with about $400 to furnish the whole thing (besides my water filter and mosquito net, which were provided, great). It's really cute, and considering how much time I spend here (read: I hide in my house a lot), I feel that to give an accurate impression of my time here, a description of my house is necessary.

As I said, it has 2 rooms, and the walls are made of brick covered with some kind of crumbly cement that everyone uses here for their houses. The roof is made of metal sheeting. It tends to get pretty hot inside the house during the day, but I leave the windows open all the time and sleep with my door propped open, so it's bearable at night. Once we get into hot season, I plan on sleeping outside on my porch like most Burkinabe do. Right now, my porch is just a big block of cement with the wooden framework for a hangar to cover it; in a month or 2, once all the harvests are over, I'll be able to pay to get it covered with the woven straw called secco that they all use. Because of the way that my porch was built, it turned into a giant 1.5"-deep lake every time that it rained, but I have received promises to have it redone during hot season. (All that kind of labor gets done during hot season, apparently, because people aren't busy working in the fields anymore.) Critters are not a big problem. I've killed 2 scorpions in my house so far, and I had a big cricket infestation until I went on a rampage with insecticide. I still see little lizards and geckos around sometimes, but they don't bother me except when they poop all over the walls.

There isn't any electricity or running water in my whole village. To charge the laptop, I purchased a 12V car battery and a power inverter that plugs straight into it. The car battery, despite weighing a good 20+ pounds, appears to be weaker than the computer battery, so I've had to take it to the market to get charged rather often. (There are some boutiques in the market that have solar panels or that run generators during certain hours of the day so that people can charge their car or cell phone batteries for $0.80 or $0.20, respectively.) I also have done silly things such as plugging the power inverter into the battery with the polarity reversed, which broke the inverter, but luckily there was someone in town who was able to fix it for me reasonably cheaply. Lesson learned. For water? There was a 12-year-old girl named Fanta who was coming over to my house between 5:45 and 6 am once every few days to pump water for me, but I think that she's leaving town tomorrow to go to school in another village. There are a smattering of water pumps around the village so that no one is too far away from one, and they are free to use, but you have to hand-crank all the water. Everyone in town uses bidons, which are recycled 20-liter plastic oil jugs that anyone who has ventured into an industrial kitchen is familiar with. I have 2 bidons, which she would strap to the back of my bike and take to the pump about a 5-minute walk away. I use a little less than 1 bidon a day, depending on whether I take 1 or 2 baths, and 2 bidons to do a week's worth of laundry. Extra water is stored in a big plastic trash-can thing reserved for that purpose called a barrick. Now that she's gone, I may recruit a student to do it for me. You only ever see young kids or teenage girls at the pumps; fetching water is considered children's labor. On the plus side, I can make them not come between 5:45 and 6 am anymore.

What else is there to say. The shower area and latrine are off in their own corner of the courtyard. The latrine, not photographed, is just a little hole in the cement, and it goes down pretty deep. Like the porch, the latrine and shower area are paved in cement, but they weren't built that well. They both tend to get flooded with water every time it rains, which leaves behind a heavy residue of sand and gravel once it drains. Maybe they'll get redone too. Neither of them has an actual door, but rather their privacy is protected by their being around a little corner of wall. Since I'm the only one in my courtyard, it's not an issue.

The whole courtyard is surrounded by a solid brick fence about 7 feet tall, with a bright green metal gate in front. It latches from the inside, but opens from the outside as well, though I lock it at night. It affords me a lot of privacy. Sometimes neighborhood kids try to look in my windows or peer in between the cracks of the gate, but few of them have figured out how to open the gate from the outside, and even those who did tend to leave me alone. Each room has 2 windows, all covered in mosquito netting. No one has glass windows here, but instead the use metal shutters that can be closed to keep out prying eyes or harmattan winds.

A lot of other volunteers who are replacing previous volunteers at their sites are moving into their old houses. Some people got lucky and moved in somewhere that was nicely furnished already, while other people were less lucky and got houses that only had a disgusting mattress left behind as furnishing. They all got $200 to furnish their houses. Evidently there was another volunteer at my site a few years ago, but I don't know what happened to her house. At any rate, I'll leave behind something nice for future volunteers.

Now for pictures. Certain friends of mine may accuse me of cleaning up the house before I took pictures to make myself look better, but this is really what it looks like normally. Really, it is. Now I sound like I'm lying.

The view from the front door

I started a postcard wall above the table after I took this picture, so, send me postcards.

Mosquito net doubles as storage for clothes and towels

Front door

Latrine hidden on the far left, and shower to the right of it

My bike! The plastic teakettle is for doing the dishes

Myspace-style picture with the house.

Unrelatedly:

Well hello there.