My daily life

My day to day life is a bit different from life in Ukiah, but not radically so, as I live in the country's capitol city, where many of the international companies and organizations are based. I have electricity and water in my house. The electricity is on most of the time. The planned brown-outs happen only a few hours a month now (it was every other day when I first arrived). The water lines are 20-30 years old and frequently break or get leaks. So we stock-pile water in 5 gallon size containers outside and have eight 1 gallon containers inside. That way we can make drinking water, clean up, etc whenever the water is off. This happens every few day, with the periods lasting from 2 to 36 hours. Boy, do we learn to conserve water!

One of my usual daily chores is adding water to the tank of the water filter and drawing off the filtered drinking water, putting it into bottles and then into the fridge. People really appreciate cold water when it is hot outside. We also use an electric pot for boiling water rather than just boiling it on the stove all the time. The pot makes about a quart at a time, so maybe is not the best use for large amounts of water. We use thermos flasks daily to share hot water for tea and coffee with any who want it.

My time is spent doing “anything I please” as I like to tell those who ask. A retired person here is still very rare, be it Ugandan or expatriate. One morning a week I go to Heritage International School and do copy work for the teachers. Sometimes there are other small jobs that I can do to help the principal or the administrative secretary. I have even “taught” a class for the juniors and seniors in SAT preparation. Teaching isn't my real strength, but it has helped out the school these past 2 years.

I have been doing housing management for EMI which will be as big or little a job as I want. The hours and days are flexible and so far it seems that there is an improvement in the identified areas. God's sense of humor really comes to light here when I am the one to teach the cleaning ladies how to do “deep cleaning”. Since I haven't really cleaned my house at all for many years, I found it more than funny that I was the one insisting on cleaning the light fixtures, washing the invisible places, scrubbing grout between all the tiles, etc. Too funny...