Open house!

I wanted to post some photos of the house where I am staying in Chimoio. I think the house tells quite a lot about Mozambique's history with colonialism.

Let's start in the living room. The flooring in the living room is beautiful. I'm pretty sure they are real hard wood floors! Unfortunately, the fire place is completely faux. Otherwise, I'd be making log fires every evenings. You should also notice how spacious the room feels, which I think is a direct result of the lack of furniture except for the massive buffet/hutch thing.

Next up is the kitchen, you will find that the house has a pretty well-stocked kitchen. We have a natural gas burner, a fridge, lots of storage space, and lots of pots and pans. One interesting thing about many houses in Mozambique is that they were built with full plumbing. If you look at the sink, you can see that there are built in faucets. Unfortunately, water only dribbles out of the faucet for about an hour each day and my understand is that the timing is highly variable. As a result, we generally fill up large yellow jerry cans with water using our well in the backyard. Thirty years ago, I'm pretty sure that water flowed from these taps! You can see the jerry can in the photo on the left-hand side. The jerry can also doubles as a dining chair!









On to the bathroom. In the bathroom, you will notice some serious infrastructure. Not only is there a toilet, sink, bathtub with a really nice looking shower, but there is even a bidet! My house back home does not have a bidet.




























Lastly, my bedroom. Check out the awesome curtains. I spent Saturday morning in the clothes market where I bought these used curtains for 80 meticals, which is roughly 3 bucks. I don't know if it was a good deal, but I needed some serious window coverage since I was waking up at 6am every morning from the light. Unfortunately, the curtain didn't cover the entire window, so I've had a supplement it with some random clothes I found. Along the left wall, you will see the make-shift table I've created using some old boxes. In the middle of the room is my mattress as well as some lovely floral bedsheets that are being lent to me by a Peace Corps Volunteer. Most importantly, I have installed my sleeping shield, also known as a mosquito net. If I'm at home, I basically live in this thing - I read, eat dinner, watch episodes of the West Wing in there! The mosquitoes aren't that bad, but they really annoy me and I probably have a wee bit of malaria-paranoia.

That's it! I hope you enjoyed the mini tour of my house in Chimoio. It is certainly a far cry from living on a farm, but it is certainly different from living in Toronto or Boston!