What is our living situation on campus like?

We told a lot of you before that we have our own house: three bedrooms, a decent-sized kitchen, a fireplace, one bathroom, a screened-in back porch that has a clothesline. Our floors are brown-colored concrete that get really cold in the mornings. We have a lot of windows, though all them--and the front porch--have bars over them because a couple of years ago our house was broken into. We're careful to always keep our doors and windows locked. The hot water heater for our shower is pretty small, so we all take "army showers" to conserve hot water for the next guy. Sometimes we won't have running water for a couple of days at a time, and we're not quite sure why. The power goes off occasionally. In order to run our laptops and laser printer, we plug a voltage regulator into the outlet in the wall, to try to keep the voltage at a stable 220. There are electrical spikes that the regulator sometimes doesn't catch, though, so we plug a surge suppressor into the regulator and then our laptops into the surge suppressor.

We just found out that a pregnant cat is living in our attic. Tommy has no affinity for felines, which made last night's near-breach of last line of defense (a bolted back door) especially traumatic. She woke us up purring, asking us to feed her. It sounded like she was in our bedrooms, and we're guessing that's because she was prowling around between our ceilings and our sloped roof.

We have a cook who makes three meals a day for us, six days a week. His name is Zacchieus, and we call him "Pa." Charlie and Wes ate his cooking last summer at Travis and Susan Myers' house on campus, so we knew a little about him before we came. There were many legends that had grown up around him: we thought he traveled with the Peace Corps, lived in Germany for several years, and learned to cook there. We've gradually demythologized Pa! Actually, he's lived here in Ndu all his life and worked some with the Peace Corps here. He is a father of seven, and although we don't think he's a believer, he is extremely kind and very proud of his work. Whenever we thank him for his delicious meals, he flashes us a big grin and gives us two thumbs up. He's an amazing cook. Sometimes he makes Cameroonian food for us, but mainly he cooks more American-style foods. He even made burgers one day, with home-made, from-scratch buns and cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayo, and ketchup.