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Published: October 19th 2007
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Gerry and I thought in this blog entry, we would feature our home here in Dodoma. We are living very comfortably in a one-bedroom unit with kitchen, a sitting room and a small study. Our unit is one of six in a compound owned by the Diocese of Central Tanganyika, our employer. Our neighbours in the compound are other diocesan employees, mostly other teachers at CAMS. The people living here come from New Zealand, Australia and England.
The compound has a 24-hour guard to keep an eye on things. We often have people wanting to sell us crafts and the like so one of the functions of the guard is to ask those people to set up their wares outside the gate rather than knocking on doors. As well as preventing vandalism in the area, the guards water the plants and generally keep the place tidy.
We are fortunate to have running water and are equipped with a heater that, if you remember to turn it on, will ensure hot water for washing in about twenty minutes. We do not drink the water from the tap but do have a fine filter unit that I fill each evening. Once
filtered, the water is good to drink.
Electrical power is fairly reliable. It does ‘brown-out’ from time to time and sometimes just goes off; often it seems at inopportune moments like meal preparation time. If the power goes off in the morning it will usually be off for most of the day, returning around suppertime. I am told this is an energy conservation measure. If the power goes off in the evening, it often indicates a breakdown of some kind so it is not so easy to predict when it will be back. The power outages, however, have not been overly long and we have had no trouble dealing with them. An interesting aside is that the power can go off in Dodoma and it seems to effect very little of what goes on. Most businesses here do not use a cash register. Washing clothes, dishes, etc is done by-hand. The people who sew clothes use treadle machines. When they are ironing the garments they have made they use a hollow iron full of smoldering charcoal for heat. Many people here use charcoal fires in their homes to cook. So for a lot of people, life can go on
Gerry at our front door
We are very well screened on all the doors and windows throughout the house . It will take pretty smart mosquito to get us!! quite normally without electrical power. I have to smile, recalling at school in Victoria if the power went off it seemed a reason to shut the school down. Here I have gone for whole days at school without power and not even noticed until the end of the day.
Twice a week, Mama Maria comes for most of the day to do the housework. Mama Maria has never been to school and speaks very little English so when she comes it provides us with a wonderful opportunity to practice our Swahili. She begins by washing the clothes. After being washed, the clothes are dried outside in the sun. In order to ensure that any of the little bugs that may have got into the clothes while they are drying are quite dead, everything is ironed - even socks and underwear. It feels quite decadent to pull on freshly pressed underwear every morning. Maria also cleans up any dishes that need washing, wipes down all the floors (the floors here are concrete so are quite easy to keep clean), dusts and bakes bread for us.
We have access to a vehicle, a Nissan Patrol, that belongs to the school.
We are able to sign up to use it and then pay a mileage fee if we need it for an errand. We use the Patrol usually when we are doing a big shop for groceries or other items that will be difficult to carry home. The rest of the time we do our errands on foot or on a bicycle.
While we do not have livestock, a number of our neighbours do. Our next-door neighbour has chickens and is keen for us to feed our kitchen scraps to them, so we do that. There are several cows in the neighbourhood as well so if we wanted to buy fresh milk we could. So far, however, we have opted for the safety of packaged milk, commercially produced.
It would be impossible to sleep-in here. As sunrise approaches each morning the neighbourhood roosters begin their wake-up calls. The local mosque chimes in at about the same time with the morning call to prayer. And then, just to make sure everyone is up, the train/bus station just down the street announces on a loud speaker in Swahili the entire day’s arrival and departure schedule. It is good that we have
Our Sitting Room
Here is Bruce studying his Swahili in the sitting room. to be up early anyway as our working day begins at school at 7:30.
Much as other towns and cities have distinct areas, so does Dodoma. The area of the town we live in is called ‘Uzunguni’. Many of the streets here do not have names so it seems a bit special to live on ‘Biringi Avenue’. The end of our street at one time was paved but isn’t any more. It is a little bumpy with some fairly substantial potholes so it is good that the Patrol is a very solidly built vehicle - 4WD and diesel.
We hope you enjoy this look at our Dodoma home. It is entirely different from anywhere we have lived before but we are very comfortable, we are a short walk to work, and we have great neighbours - what more could you want?
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