In This House That I Call Home

I would be honored if you would come over to our home today to see how we are…

Somewhere in one of the PC manuals, it was written that a PCV’s mother encapsulated her daughter’s dwelling as such: “It looked like she lived in a gas station.” Every PCV home is unique but ours is probably more gas-station-like than most. In this country where mud huts with leaky straw roofs abound, I am wildly happy about that.

Come on through the courtyard to our porch!

Watch out for that unripe mango in the top right corner of the photo. It is attached to a lovely mango tree that unfortunately attracts hordes of mosquitoes and bats at night.

This is our lovely porch where we park our bikes during the day. Straight ahead is our bedroom window. Come on in, the door’s open!

Here’s Dave, screening entrants through the screen door. Tell him you’re with me and he won’t hassle you.

Now we’re in the foyer of our manse. The kitchen is to your right. But where’s the water filter?

Oh, there’s Dave with the water filter – he’s just refilling it so we can have parasite- and amoeba- free water to enjoy.

Here’s a view of the kitchen, easily the hottest area of the house when the stove is on, at which point we rename the area “Clinton.” This is also the laundry washing station and utility closet.

The long view of the kitchen features the prep station / dish drying rack in the foreground. Let’s take a look at what’s on the prep station to see what we’re having for dinner tonight.

It looks like we’re having a vegetable pasta casserole with mangoes for dessert.















Look at those glorious fruits and vegetables! We bought all of those fruits and vegetables for 825 CFA, or $1.65.

We’re now leaving the kitchen and heading into the parlor.

This is the parlor where we entertain company and take in the evening journal with tea and warm scones. You can also see the computer upon which I compose the blog posts that you all love so much.

More parlor action. We just had our weekly bridge game with the Konatés in this room, so lovely.

Adjacent to the parlor are the entrances to the East and West Wings of our manse. This shot also shows one of our most prized possessions, an electric fan that runs approximately 22 hours / day. It is undoubtedly the hardest working member of the household.

As you can see, the entrance to the East Wing is next to the entrance to the house in the foyer. Hey, is that a tin roof? Let’s take a closer look.

Wow, what a tin roof! If you’re thinking it looks like it mercilessly traps heat in the house and is thunderously loud when it rains, then you are a genius!

We have entered the East Wing. On the right side of the annex, it looks woefully bare during the day.

However, at night it comes alive as a bike parking lot. (Everyone in Burkina brings bikes and motos inside the home at night to avoid theft. I like having a safe bike but I really dislike tracking dirt and donkey poop from the road inside my otherwise pristine home.)

The East Wing also serves as a laundry drying area, as evinced by lavish number of laundry lines (3). We probably only needed one line, but we couldn’t resist spoiling ourselves!!

You know you live a luxurious life when you own a king-size bug tent that you sleep in every night. What makes it a teeny bit less opulent is the fact that it precariously perches on a twin size mattress.

Here’s the bedroom window, which you saw from the outside earlier. This window is amazingly engineered in that it lets in absolutely no breeze, but does not filter any of the chicken / children squawking from the courtyard beginning around 5:30 AM.

Now let’s explore the West Wing of our lovely home. As you can see, many adventures and possibilities await!

Directly to the right of the entrance is the indoor shower room. Actually, since we don’t have running water it’s just a tiled, walled off corner with a floor drain which doubles as a hand-washing station. Can you guess which towel is Dave’s?

Around the corner from the shower room is our library. It proudly contains the second largest collection of English-language books in West Africa.

Here you can feast your eyes upon the window in our library, beneath which our laundry collection pile quietly awaits Thursday, laundry day. To the left you can catch a glimpse of our dressing area. We considered installing a California Closet, but ultimately decided it would be too bourgeois for our international development lifestyle.

Our dressing area is the place where we dress and tress for success to impress and outshine the rest. We use the mirror on the left to make sure we look gorgeous before stepping out of the house each day, and thank goodness it hasn’t failed us yet.

As you can see, the study is just a few paces from the dressing area. Isn’t our home a cozy one?

The last stop on our tour is the study, where we feverishly design trainings and workshops on appropriate technology and best business practices for the masses. Thanks for visiting our house today! Feel free to stop by anytime for a glass of warm, bleached water and … oh, you say you need to stop by the bathroom before heading out? Well, then just follow me outside…

Do you see the door on the right out there? That’s our latrine, padlocked for our exclusive usage.

We keep our very precious stock of toilet paper in the purple bucket. The storage of TP here is actually why we have the padlock – there’s a high street resale value for TP. The latrine is not completely unpleasant… during the day. At night there are lots of cockroaches crawling around and excelling at harassing the unlucky user.

Thanks for visiting us! Come back soon now, ya hear?