Tour of Our Home

This week I thought it would be fun to show you around our house (even though it is going to take my whole battery just to upload the pictures....lol). Without any further adieu....Welcome to our house in Kotido......

This is the obvious the front of our house. It is has 3 bedrooms and is probably about 1000 square ft.


The housing right outside our house that has 5 units, but we only have access to 4 of the units and they have 2 rooms each. It is full right now with different people that needed a place to live, so currently there is no room at the inn :)

Our yard. It needs some TLC but with no water what can you do? Notice our nice living fence made from thorns. It is actually a good fence and no one would want to climb over it. The only downside is the critters that like to live in it such as mice, rats, and spiders. And that is the outside of the pit latrine on the left.



And just because most of you have not seen the inside of a pit latrine I had to include this. It pretty much just has a hole in it. This pit latrine is actually really nice compared to many I have seen and been in. Consider it the Cadillac of pit latrines :)
Here is our dish washing station. Notice the nice drying rack my husband made, it even has a wind blocker to keep the wind from blowing our dishes away. I love his engineer mind :) Those basins are also what we take a bath in. But we don't actually fit in them.....


Our water collection station. We collect water in those yellow containers that are called Jerry Cans.
My new stove. It is called a coal pot and I am just learning to use it. You burn wood in the bottom of it and set your pots and such on top of it. I will use it to cook things that take a while to cook (beans) because propane is expensive and 5 hours away.

Step inside....
This is our kitchen. Our propane stove and nice cement counter that was custom made with convenient storage underneath where cockroaches love to live.

Part of our kitchen. The lovely water tank my husband made. See the lovely spout at the bottom. This is our kitchen sink where we wash hands and such but we don't drink this water, we have another tank of water that we have filtered for drinking.

Our dining room/school room

Our living room


The boy's room

Our lovely new pet hedgehog (and Carter's best friend), Knuckles. We all think he is super cute. Funny story how we got him. A boy brought him to our house to sell him. We paid 50 cents for him. Today a man came by and knocked on our gate and said, "I hear your family likes pets and my sisters from the village have brought a monkey to sell." (news travels fast around here, and apparently our family has quite the reputation) My response, "Sorry we don't want a monkey." For the record they carry Ebola around here, and other diseases such as rabies. I looked out the gate and there in a bag was the monkey going all crazy inside. Just what we need....a monkey. I think not, but we had a good laugh about it.

Lastly......our shoe mess outside our door. I will say we had company but I think the kids miss the whole point of the lovely shoe basin I created. At least they didn't wear their shoes inside. It is bad enough that we have to sweep 2-3 times a day with the dirt and dust.

Well that is it. I hope you enjoyed our tour. Love to you all.
Michaela