It’s time for an apartment update!  We’ve now been living in our place in Dar es Salaam for 3 months. We’ve started work (in earnest) but that doesn’t mean we haven’t made some improvements to the apartment.

We’ve expanded the plant life in our place and now are cultivating basil. Who knew you could grow basil in Africa?! These two beauties sit on our kitchen windowsill where the breeze and sun abound.

It took us a couple of months, but we are now absolutely convinced that the onions here are incredible. We put them in guacamole, fresh salsa, bean dishes, salads.  We eat them raw a lot and, as long as you can handle the tearful preparation, you will reap great rewards when eating.

We cook with gas, which is awesome.  But when I say gas I mean we have gas tanks like this next to the stove and have to manually flip a tab to allow it to flow whenever we need it.  Kind of harrowing at first but we’re used to it now.  And we are nearly on our second tank, which feels like some kind of milestone worth celebrating.

Why in the world did we decide the water bucket filtration tower needed to be even taller than it was?  The answer has something to do with repeatedly overflowing our water jug as it filled, sometimes to the tune of 5 gallons of water spread across our kitchen floor.  (Bonus points if you noticed the Jim Beam on the counter that I found at a liquor store on the peninsula)

There have been improvements to the living/dining room as well.  Our friend and fellow volunteer Tess brought us a runner from Dodoma (central Tanzania) that she had made for us.  And you can see the Anthro candle now has neighbors that Olivia fashioned out of empty bottles from our favorite (cheap) white wine we’ve found.

It certainly doesn’t feel like Christmas here.  It’s like 90+ degrees and 90+ humidity everyday (which, as an aside, is a really weird feeling to experience when intellectually you know it is December).  But we’re still bringing a little holiday cheer to the place with these stockings we found for $6 at our local grocery store.  We haven’t used the TV for much else.

We’ve used our guest room for guests a few times (with several more planned before our service is over) but it gets weekly use as our laundry drying room.  We weren’t allowed to put any holes in the walls so we hang clothes from lines strung from the curtain rods, and we use the mosquito net line as well (you can see it folded up in-between).

I brought two old OHSU work bags with me intending to give one away as a gift.  Good thing I didn’t because my old black bag’s shoulder strap and zipper both broke last week.  So I’ll be sporting a new bag with me to work and the hospital going forward.

And we can’t leave out the yoga room (which is still used exclusively for yoga by Olivia).  We’ve added more greenery to the space and so far it hasn’t created any allergic response from Liv while she breathes deeply.  She also wanted me to point out her new purple yoga block.