A new home

In mid-December, the project purchased a new house for expatriate staff, and since we don’t have very many expats right now, it has now become my house. Though I am now settled and very happy with my new home, it has been quite a process to get to this point.

When I first saw the house in December, I was appalled. It definitely matched some of the worst houses I’ve worked to rehabilitate in the U.S. The previous owner had not taken good care of it, so it was filthy, and I do mean the mice / cockroaches / holes-in-walls / completely-overgrown-yard / broken-everything kind of filthy. Plus it had a really strange floor plan, without a kitchen but with a number of tiny, seemingly-useless rooms. After that first visit, I was ready to refuse to move and find my own housing somewhere else, but since I knew the project had plans to do some work on the house, I decided to wait one week.

Almost immediately, workers came and began replacing the broken windows and screens, installing a hot water heater and building a kitchen sink. The other immediate steps – hanging mirrors in the bathrooms and picking our material for curtains – surprised me. With so much major work to be done, mirrors and curtains were about the last thing on my list, but for some reason it was decided that they needed to be done, so I went along with it. Soon after, I selected paint colors, and in a day the house was painted, though the colors aren’t really the ones I picked at all, but I’m not complaining. A refrigerator and stove were added soon thereafter, and a trip to the furniture market brought beds and sofas and tables and cabinets. The other big shopping trip was to T2000, the closest thing Kigali has to a Wal-Mart. I think I made everyone’s day there as I loaded up basket after basket with sheets, towels, blankets, mosquito nets, kitchen supplies, etc. I’m confident I was the biggest spender of the week, if not the month.

Although it sounds like all of this could have been accomplished in just a couple days, it has taken right at a month. Certainly there are still a few things that need to be done – cockroaches still appear frequently; I’m waiting on some more cabinets from the market; the washing machine out back spews water everywhere – but the house is definitely livable, and now that I’ve moved in and gotten settled, it’s really starting to feel like home. I’ll add some pictures soon.