Our House

I'm putting up a second post only because I could actually get on my blog. Since I haven't posted in a while, I figured I'd get on while I could.

In the last post--earlier today--I mentioned our house. It's not fancy by American standards, but it's really very nice by Ugandan standards. The floor is a cement slab without any covering or finish. It's very bright with lots of windows. I think the windows are because the electricity goes out on a regular basis. It's not a problem on campus since we have a back-up generator and a back up for the back up. When the electricity goes out we have power from about 6 AM until 11 PM.

I'm going to try to upload a picture of our house, just to give an idea of what it looks like. I think I've mentioned before that it's half of a duplex. We have three bedrooms and one bath. It's furnished. It came with four chairs--wooden frames with cushions, a coffee table and two small end tables. The dining room has a table with six chairs. We have a small stove--it's called a cooker here--and a fairly small refrigerator. The bedrooms each have a full size bed. However, the mattresses are just foam. They look sort of like mattresses at home, but trust me, there's no inner spring bounce to them.

Since we moved in I had a local carpenter build us a large bookshelf, a stool and two small tables--one for the kitchen and one for the living room. The kitchen one we use for the toaster oven and the living room one is for the computer and printer. The bedrooms don't have any dressers, but there is a closet in each bedroom. I may have the same carpenter build a couple of shelves for the bedrooms, just to have a place to put stuff.

The cooker has two gas burners and two electric burners. I believe the gas is propane. There is a tank next to the stove. Mostly I use the gas burners when the power is off, otherwise I use the electric ones. It took me a while to figure out the oven. It's electric and the degree markings are Celsius, so I had to figure out how to change my recipes from Fahrenheit to Celsius. So far I've made biscuits, corn bread and banana bread. I want to make cookies but I don't have a flour sifter yet, and I'm afraid they'll turn out like rocks if I don't sift. The flour here is less refined, which is probably healthier, but it's heavier. I have a taste for Snickerdoodles so I'm trying to find a sifter. It took me a while to find baking powder and baking soda. I now have both. Baking soda, especially, is not easy to find.

Bry'Chell has made lots of friends at school. I think part of the reason is because she's something of a novelty. She's the only kid in the whole school with hair. Both the boys and the girls get their hair cut to the scalp at the beginning of each term. Bry'Chell is figuring out which kids like her for herself and which ones like her because they think she's a rich American. She is sort of astounded by the rich American label. From her perspective, she's a poor American. It's sort of funny to be seen as rich. In some ways we are, but in other ways we're not. For example, people are surprised that I do Bry'Chell's braids. They think I would send to to the salon to have them done, although everyone with whom I've spoken admits that it's expensive to have her hair "plaited", as they say here, at the salon.

I'm trying to post a few pictures, including our house, like I mentioned earlier, a picture of Bry'Chell with a school friend and Bry'Chell walking to school. She's wearing her "house" shirt in the pictures because these are Saturday pictures when she's going to school for school functions on Saturday, in this case the Senior Six party. They still have to wear their uniform skirts, but they can wear their house t-shirts. How liberal can you get.