Our New Home

We have been in our new home for 4 days now… It’s a nice size house located in Magomeni, which I guess you could call a suburb of Mtwara town. Living in Magomeni is like living in a small village again. It’s a quaint little area, where the majority of our neighbors live in mud homes and the mamas spend their days outside cooking away at their jikos. There are also a ton of kids that just love the new wazungo (white people). We have a following of watoto (children) that sit and play on our front porch and get so excited when we come outside.

Our house is located exactly 2 miles away from the beach and the Indian Ocean. We have a new favorite run that is right along the water; it’s beautiful and definitely makes me feel like I’m on vacation. It’s also a really nice place for us to escape to when we need a break from village life. Because of our location to the water, there is an ample supply of fresh fish sold at our local soko (market), which is about a 2-minute walk from our house. The fish here are incredible and sooo cheap. Last night we bought 4 nice filets of tuna for a total of 2000tsh, which is equivalent to $1.50….amazing! It’s nice that we are saving money in the food department because we have been spending shillingi non-stop to try to settle into our big empty house.

The house has a living room, dining room, kitchen/pantry, 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms with real showers that actually work! No more bucket baths for Moss and me. When we arrived, the organization I work for already supplied us with a bed, a mattress, a table, two chairs, and curtains for all the windows. We are so thankful for everything they gave us, but we wish we could have picked out our curtains.

So in the process of getting settled in this weekend we rode our bikes to the large soko in town and bought big wicker/straw mats to put on the concrete floors in the living room and dining room. We also found 2 little hand-carved wooden chairs and a mini Tanzanian kitanda (bed) made of wood and wicker/straw. We got the kitanda for 6000tsh or about $4 and are using it for our sofa right now, but we plan to go to the fundi (carpenter) down the street with a picture of what we want for our sofa and see if he can make it. As for other purchases we bought a small refrigerator and an electric burner, which makes life sooo much easier! We have been cooking on a kerosene jiko since we arrived in Mtwara, and now it feels like such a luxury to have 2 burners and to be able to cook more than one thing at a time.

Anyway, that’s a mini update on our house. I will take and upload photos soon, but I’m not quite ready to pull out our camera in front of the kids and neighbors. Right when the watoto and neighbors see our camera, they will come knocking on our door asking us to “piga picha” all the time. So somehow I will try to sneak a picture of the house and the neighborhood.

Oh, in other news we have a cute new kitten! She is sooo adorable! I will tell you all about Kali next time.

XOXOX