Pictures: Our Malian Home

Hello All, We’ve received a couple requests for pictures of the inside of our house since a big part of Peace Corps is the living conditions. We’ll continue making improvements throughout our service (i.e. Joye has plans to paint soon) but for now, the basics are pretty much in place. Firstly, we live in a 2 room mudbrick house with cemented inner walls and floors and a tin roof. Though we don’t have electricity or running water, I think many of you would be surprised at how quickly you adapt to a new routine and standard of living.

 

 

Our Kitchen : Complete with a propane stove and lots of plastic Tupperware/buckets to keep the bugs away from our food. Note our card and picture wall where we hang all our notes from home :) The kitchen and “living room” together make up 1 of the 2 rooms in our house.

 

 

 

 

Our “Living Room”: Though we cleaned it up a bit and moved some chairs outside for the picture, its currently a bit crowded with painting and gardening supplies. We’re hoping to have a 3rd small storage room built soon to free up some space.  All of our furniture was built by our village carpenter. Oh, and we’ve written a few encouraging Bible verses on the walls in chalk to help us through some of our more challenging days.

 

Our Bedroom: Mosquito net covered bed and our PC issued bikes. On the right, Jim models a shirt that just got finished at our local village tailor. One really nice thing about our house is the big screened windows Peace Corps had put in. These mudbrick houses heat up in the Malian sun and its nice to get a breeze going through every once in a while.

 

Our Bathroom: The picture to the right is actually not our personal bathroom but a picture of a nicer than average nyegen (Malian latrine). A picture of our personal nyegen is coming soon.  Ours is very similar to the picture, four 7 ft tall cement walls with a cemented floor and covered hole for going to the bathroom, no roof. We bathe off to the side using a large bucket filled with water and a small cup to pour water over our heads.

 

 

So that pretty much covers it! Hope you enjoy and let us know if you have any questions!

~Joye