Welcome to my humble abode...

I'll write a post in a little bit to let you know what I've been up to for the past week, but to keep you occupied until then, here are some photos of my house/office here in Ourossogui. Enjoy!


First off we have the compound itself. The building to the left is the office, the building at the back houses all of the sleeping quarters. Normally it's just Jenna (another Tostan volunteer), Thiado (the guard, who basically our punk older brother), and myself staying here, but during regional meetings there can be up to 18 people staying here. There are 4 bedrooms, each with 2-3 beds in each (Jenna and I share a room). Now you can see why it's difficult to keep work and home life seperate!


Here is the inside of the office, which is a lovely turquoise colour. Jenna and I work out of the "conference room", which basically means that we sit at a giant, battered wooden table on 3 plastic lawn chairs stacked together so we can see over the top. We have a fan though, which is now officially my favorite invention EVER.



Here is the infamous spicket (sp?) that ALL of our water comes from. It is in the front yard, and generally only runs for 45 minutes sometime between 7am and 8am every morning, though on rare occassions it will come back on for a couple of minutes in the after noon. Every morning we wake up and fill up at least 4 buckets from this tap so we can wash, do laundry, drink water, and have something to "flush" with. Consistent and clean running water is one of the things I miss the most back home!


Here is our bathroom/shower/sink. There used to be a couple of cockroaches living in the toilet, but they've been strangely absent for the past couple of days. I'm now able to have a complete "shower" using less than 2 of those small plastic cups of water. The downside of this is that there's not enough water to ever shave my legs (thank you Irish genes for giving me man-hair on my legs...) and my hair only happens about twice a week. On the plus side, I try to shower twice a day as we sweat buckets out here in the desert....


This is the "kitchen", which is actually just a fridge in the hallway. We are fighting an epic battle against an ant colony at the moment, who tries to invade the fridge everytime there's a power outage (which is currently on a daily basis). We also have a gas tank with an adaptor on it that acts as our stove, though we've been bad about cooking lately and tend to get nembe (bean) sandwiches from a lady down the street for about 67 cents Canadian. Fortunately the side effects of the beans have yet to express themselves...


This is the bedroom - it's an old picture but we were cleaning today so I couldn't take a new one. Jenna and I share the room, our food, an armoire, the office, bugs, and pretty much everything else in between...


This is one of the greatest gifts I've ever received - the best ceramic water filter in the world. Beside it is one of our "drinking water" buckets, waiting to be filled. Thank you Cruger - I owe you big time, and I will make sure that it is in pristine condition when I give it back before I go.


My life here fits into half an armoire. It's pretty impressive.


That's about it for the office/house - I'm going to leave you with some photos I took on the roof so you can see what the neighborhood is like. Enjoy!