Kuuliza si ujinga

When people think of the Peace Corps, they often picture living in a mud hut with a thatched roof, cooking over a fire and fetching water in buckets from a river. And while it's very possible that some environmental volunteers live this way, education volunteers are usually in less remote areas, and live in teachers' houses (which are nicer than the average village house). Here's a glimpse of the spectrum of volunteers' houses.

On one end: concrete house with a metal roof. Concrete floors. No electricity. No water. This is my house. The house itself is great: there's a dining/living room and three other rooms, a walled courtyard in the back, and a pit toilet, room for bathing, room for cooking, and room for storage behind the courtyard. I use a kerosene lamp at night, cook on a charcoal stove or a kerosene stove, and fetch water in 20 L or 40 L buckets from the faucet by my house. It's simple, but functional. And--I should say this before I go on--I love my house. While I wouldn't complain if electricity miraculously reached my village while I leave there, I wouldn't leave my pit toilet, bucket baths, and kerosene lamps for another site.

More in-between: I visited a friend on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, who has running water and a sink, but no electricity. She has a shower and flush toilet, and cooks on a gas stove. The stove is powered by a large propane tank, which she occasionally carries to a neighbor's store so that it can be taken to town and refilled.

Safi sana! (very nice): I've visited two friends who teach at teachers' training colleges. These sites are generally very well set-up. They have both electricity and water in their house, at least in theory (I say in theory because both the electricity and the water can be unreliable). One has an small electric stove he bought for himself, the other a propane-powered gas stove the head of his school bought him as a welcoming gift. And of course, having electricity allows one to get all sorts of useful things, from blenders to refrigerators to laptops.

So there's a sample of the spectrum of Peace Corps teachers' houses. In many ways they're very similar: all concrete houses with metal roofs and concrete floors, and generally furnished with maps on the walls and random piles of books, old boxes that came by mail, and Newsweeks from Peace Corps. And, no matter how many blenders or refrigerators or laptops people have, we all share one more thing in common: no washers or dryers. Some people may be washing clothes while their blender whirs and their plugged-in iPod plays music in the background, but we're all washing our underwear by hand.