My House

A few people have asked about my living conditions out here in Gobabis, so I thought I’d give you all some details. When I joined Peace Corps, I anticipated that I’d be living in a hut somewhere without running water or electricity. For good or bad, my housing conditions are far more luxurious than that. I’m living in a small, concrete two-bedroom house about a twenty-minute walk from my office that is owned by the Namibian government. I live with another PCV, Angela who is an Education volunteer from Group 25. The house has both electricity and running water (hot water even!). We have all the kitchen basics (which aren’t all basic for Namibia): stove, oven, refrigerator, and freezer. We also have a television which gets three stations, one of them is a televangelist channel and the other two basically only show newscasts and soap operas. In our kitchen pantry, there is a mini-library of books accumulated from the PCVs in the region (I’ve already read most of the good ones). And people have pooled their DVDs to form a small collection from which everyone borrows movies to take to their sites. The most surprising amenity though would like be the internet; yes, I have internet in my house! It’s dial-up but it’s actually pretty fast as far as Namibian internet services go; it uses phone cards so on a PC budget, its too expensive to use daily but its nice to have it for occasional usage. Given the above living conditions, I really don’t have anything to complain about! I don’t have to use a pit latrine, cook on a hot plate or over open fires, travel dozens of kilometers to buy groceries, or take bucket baths in frigid water (all things which some of my PCV friends here do, especially up north). The only abnormal thing I have to do is hand wash my clothes which I hate doing because it takes awhile but it certainly is a good workout!