A Day in the Life in Il Boru

Now that it is Saturday, I finally have the time to sit down and tell the details of our life here. We live in a comfortable house with a beautiful yard in a neighborhood called Il Boru, on the northeast side of Arusha. Our house has four bedrooms and can sleep six people. Right now there are five of us here--Jason and I, two 4th year medical students from Wisconsin and one 3rd year pediatric resident from South Carolina. Our housemates also include many geckos big and small (we just had a 1.5 inch one crawling on a laptop), huge slugs and snails in the garden, and two stunning tortoises that roam the yard.

Communication has progressed leaps and bounds since we were last in Africa. Our house has a direct internet connection that continues even when the power is out! And a visitor from the past left a wireless router, so we are all connected at once. Everyone also has cell phones and constantly sends text messages as that is the cheapest way to communicate. Jason is enjoying using a phone that his parents bought when they were here in November and is becoming agile at texting quickly.

Otherwise, our way of life is as we hoped and expected. Our kitchen has a refrigerator and a stove, but we light the gas burners with a match. We boil all of our drinking water and soak our vegetables in a mild bleach solution before eating them. Laundry is done by hand and dried in the open air. The house has a long tradition of hiring local folks to do chores--so we have a housekeeper who does laundry, cleaning, and dishes, and a gardener who mows the lawn with an
Amish mower, just like we have in Lancaster. We have nightwatchmen as well, to whom we take "chai" (what they call regular tea) in the evenings. Talking with our nightwatchmen makes me think fondly of Etienne, my nightwatchman and close friend in Cameroon.

Jason and I have a comfortable bedroom with a large closet and our own bathroom. We just got rid of an ant infestation in the wood frame of the bathroom window! No wonder there were so many geckos in the bathroom. The photo below on the right is the view from our window with an example of the gorgeous foliage of Arusha.


And here are our yard pets--two tortoises, one big and one small. We wondered about their gender, and then they started doing this... And we still wonder about their gender.