Daily Routine

Our apartment has two bedrooms (one for each) and a kitchen/dining/living room. I usually get up quite early in the morning (yep. Read again.) and have some quiet time before the day really starts. Sometimes we get a driver to take us to the city for meetings or just as a break. Other times we stay around and try to do stuff around the village (visit kids with problems, talk to people about not throwing trash in the streets, etc).

my room

We have a cook that is doing her best to cook healthy vegetarian food. She was surprised with the veggie part, but accepted this as part of the white person craziness. The real breakdown came when we asked her not to use margarine as the core ingredient of the food. We were rewarded by a week of rice and beans. At the end of the week when we finally had a translator with us we found out that when we said not to buy too much food because it gets spoiled (see electricity in the next paragraph) she understood that we dislike anything we gave as an example. For example fruit. Besides that we have another woman coming once a week to manually do laundry. It actually comes out clean if you know what you’re doing. Which she does.

Electricity – close followers of this blog may have noticed an occasional complaint about electricity. A recap:
- First few days: Generator. Very noisy at night. Keeps running out of fuel.
- Installed inverter + batteries. Bliss for a few days. Open Generator for a few hours. Then have a couple of days of electricity. This new setup disconnected the A/C, but we had fans and were happy.
- Inverter started causing issues. Generator stopped working.
- Hot.
- People came to connect us to the electricity. Disconnected both inverter and Generator. Said they will be back in the afternoon. Never saw them again.
- HOT. Dark. Candles. Going to sleep early.
- Reconnected Generator. Doesn’t work. Replaced it.
- Today: knock on wood: sitting at noon with the fan on battery power.