Just different...

I've noticed several things around me are different than what I was accustomed to back in Austin. I realize that these things are not better or worse, just different.

For example:
+ WATER - Nairobi is in a drought right now, a serious drought. Enough to where the animals are not migrating the way they used to be because of the lack of water. As for how that affects us, the water from the "city council" is just a trickle. So, in order to have running water in our home there is a tank outside in the ground that fills with the city water. And twice so far that tank has run dry. ugh! bad problem for a house of five people. We had to call the landlord and pay for water to be hand carried bucket by bucket to fill our tank. Each day or so, I flip a switch and pump water from this underground tank up to a tank on our roof. This is the water that will gravity flow to our sinks and toilets in the house.

+ HOT WATER - So, if I want to take a hot or even warm shower, I have to turn on the water heater located in our bathroom at least 30 minutes beforehand. And then when we are done showering in the morning, we turn it off for the rest of the day. I am not sure what would happen if we left the heater on all day. This is just what we were told to do. This was very frustrating the first week or so, but now we have the hang of it.

+ OUTLETS - all of the outlets have these nifty OFF and ON switches. I guess this is so you can turn off the power to each socket. Interesting concept, not sure why they do this, maybe it saves power. Also, all of the plugs are 3-pronged. So, that means anything I brought from the states needs a converter on it. You should see all of the cables behind our computer desk! I finally put a big piece of cardboard to cover all of those wires up. You think we were a power station with all those wires and converters :-).

+ ELECTRICITY - Speaking of power, because of the extreme drought here, this is causing other trickle down effects throughout the rest of the city, and probably country. Such as, rotating power outages. Some neighborhoods have NO power up to 3 days per week. We evidently, got lucky and aren't in one of those areas, but we have had several power outages. Good thing we don't have lots of digital clocks around the house. That would drive someone like my husband nuts to be resetting clocks so often. :-) We had a power outage just tonight! The first time it kind of scared the kids, but once we got out the headlamps (thankfully recommended by our friends Scott & Sally to bring!) and light a candle it turned out to be fun.

This is just a start. I have several more to go like...driving on the left, converting money to Schillings, Fahrenheit to Celsius, etc. I will save those for a later post!

Blessings,
Anna