My Normal: The House

I've been wanting to do this since returning to Musoma and now I've finally gotten around to it.

Here is a tour of my house!

How to Cook a Duck

My house-mate, Sarah, has a friend, Paskaria, that came over this past weekend to teach us how to cook duck. Due to a Oklahoma-worthy thunder and lighting storm in the morning, Paskaria wasn't able to arrive until 1:30pm, which is when we started the cooking lesson.

The first thing to do is meet your lunch.

Next, one must slaughter it. Thankfully our day-guard was on hand to handle that part.

Then you douse the fowl in boiling water. This allows you to easily pull all the feathers out. Paskaria's hands are very adept at pulling feathers out and quite adapted to handling boiling water. She showed us the callouses on her hands to testify to the fact that she is very used to this type of work.

Next the duck is charred over the coals until the fat starts running. That is when Paskaria quickly disassembled the duck. I was feeling quite confident that I could prepare duck until this step. She was so fast and sure of her work that I got lost and honestly quite concerned that she was going to cut herself. Have no fears, she didn't nick herself once.

After the duck was in pieces she put it in the pot to cook in its own fat.

We added some onions, tomatoes, and salt and just let the thing cook itself. 

Did you know that duck is extremely fatty?

After it had cooked for a bit Paskaria poured off some of the broth and a piece of meat for us. I was lucky enough to get the liver. Honestly, I don't like liver, I really don't. I've had it enough times in the past few years to know this for sure. But I ate it.

For all of you out there who have quite the refined palate and find duck liver patte exceptional - maybe you should move to Tanzania. Pure duck liver was the appetizer to my lunch on Saturday.

At about 3pm we finally sat down for lunch with the duck, some rice, a tomato sauce that Sarah made, and some greens. We had lunch under the banana trees in the yard.

It was a beautiful day, full of laughter and lessons. I am very impressed with Paskaria's skills and grateful that I got to learn how to cook duck from her.

Musoma Soccer

Soccer, while not a huge sport in the States, is a huge sport in many other parts of the world. I have thoroughly enjoyed playing soccer every Sunday for the past few years. I'm not good yet, but I'm way better than I used to be.

Every so often we have an office soccer game. We leave work around 3pm on a Friday, head to the field and all play together for a couple hours. It is great for building teamwork and relationships.

My Dutch colleagues are returning to the Netherlands for a few months, so we had an office soccer game this past Friday to say goodbye to them. Go orange & black!!!

It is always nice to have others from the office on the sidelines cheering us on, or heckling as the case may be. I was reminded by one of my Tanzanian colleagues that I scored on my own team during my final soccer game before returning to the States. I'm not going to live that down.

In conclusion, soccer is a wonderful and fun sport. It builds unity and teamwork, offers opportunities for heckling, and is all around a great way to spend a couple hours of your day.

Where does your washing machine drain to?

I am currently baby-sitting a washing machine for some friends that are in the States. This is a huge blessing because it is soooooo much nicer than having to hand wash all my clothes (granted, the house-help does do most of that work). Still I'll be sad when I have to say good-bye to this wonderful machine.

My house doesn't have much extra room so we converted the spare bathroom into the laundry room. The shower drain became the washing machine drain. It worked fairly well, most of the time.

Every once in a while a flood would occur. In the picture above you can see a small drain to the right of the washing machine. That drain would fill up and then water would spread out into the bedroom just outside the door. On Sunday this week I was almost late to church because I was mopping up a flood in the (thankfully mostly empty) bedroom.

So, we asked the fundi (repairman, pronounced 'foo-ndi') to come over and help us figure out how to get the drain to work properly so that there wouldn't be any more floods.

After a little examination the fundi decided that the drain was too narrow and it couldn't handle the pressure of the water from the washing machine...but thankfully there was another "drain" next to the washing machine that he thought could handle the pressure just fine.

So far the toilet seems to be able to adequately handle the pressure as the water drains from the washing machine. TIA.

*TIA = 'This is Africa'

My Normal: Drinking Water

I mentioned a couple of times in recent blog posts that I was happy to return to “my normal”. I think I should elaborate on what “my normal” actually is. There are so many things about my life here that are quite different from American life. By taking time to write about these things you’ll be able to get a better picture of my day-to-day life.

An added bonus is that I will have to look at my life through the lens of what is unique and special about it. I think everyone has a unique and special life in one way or another, but we often forget to see those things. What we see as normal or mundane in our own lives can, from the outside, seem exciting and wonderful.

So, here starts a series of blog posts about my normal, mundane, exciting and wonderful life.

Lets start with basics: drinkable water.

The water that comes out of the tap is not drinkable. Actually, technically I guess it is drinkable if I didn’t mind getting any number of stomach issues. I don’t, however, want stomach issues.

In order to get drinkable water there are a few things I must do.

Fill a bucket with tap water.

The black bucket = bad water.

Dump the black bucket of water into a BioSand filter. This filter is first filled with large rocks, then smaller and smaller rocks then topped off with sand. As the water moves through the sand, and the biofilm created by the sand, pathogens and solids are filtered out of the water.

The blue bucket = good-ish water.

The sand filtered water can be drunk, theoretically. I haven’t worked up the guts to just drink the sand filtered water straight, and since I have another filtration method in the house, just to be safe, I send the water through that as well.

Pictured below is my Katadyn filter. The blue-bucket water gets poured into the top and comes out the bottom drinkable. We fill up bottles with the water and set it to the side so that we always have lots of drinkable water ready to be used.

The three tubes inside the top portion are called candles. (When I first heard that term I was confused about how a flame could stay lit inside a plastic cylinder with water being poured over it…but then I figured out that candle doesn’t always mean a wick and flame.)

Anyway, the water gets filtered through these candles and comes out completely safe and ready to be drunk!

And that is my normal drinking water process.