The Kisumu House

The house in Kisumu is truly lovely. We have this downstairs apartment. The rest is the church meeting house. Our home has herringbone wood parquet flooring. It is light and airy with 10 windows in the living room alone. We have an entry into the dining area, a large kitchen (With plaid countertops and cupboard fronts) and a very large pantry. We have an office/spare bedroom and a master bedroom with the bathroom off that. It has a tub with a shower coming off the side of the tub. It has doors to the outside off the living room, office and kitchen (The kitchen door goes to an enclosed patio) and off the dining room into the church area. The building has sat empty for a time, but this 3 story multigenerational home was originally owned by an Indian family. The church meets in the rest of the bottom floor as well as the next two stories.

This is our livingroom.

Friday a truck moved things from Nairobi and the Missionaries helped set up the apartment. We have a sofa and two chairs, TV and DVD player, dining room table and 6 chairs, washer, dryer (not yet hooked up) Stove and refrigerator, bed box springs and mattress, end tables and a desk and filing cabinet. It was nicely arranged with some area rugs when we arrived.

There are multiple locks on each door and we are in a fenced compound with a night guard. While people are very kind and friendly, many are in amazing poverty. There seems to be a great division between the haves and the have-nots. The haves are in secure compounds with guards. The have-nots are in shanties. And there is a fluid sense of ownership. If something is lying out, it becomes the property of the person who sees it.

This house is MUCH better than camping. Still, the water filtration system is not hooked up so we must use bottled water, or boil it. And for some reason the hot water heater doesn’t work, so we only get cold water. And for some reason, last night the cold water quit running, so we couldn’t flush the toilet. On the plus side, Tom discovered a pump that was off. The water is pumped to tanks on the roof, then gravity fed to the faucets. The water worked today… but now is off again. And, when the cold water was off, we discovered that the house is plumbed for hot water to all the faucets and the tub (but not the shower… it needs an inline water heater to give hot water.) Many houses in Kenya have hot water to only one place… or none at all.

We went out late in the afternoon to get the essentials. We bought plates, utensils, a knife, an electric tea pot for heating water (It works well!) a fan (oops, it has to be wall mounted, so we lived through the 80 degrees plus humidity without it.) And we got enough food to last til Monday. We hadn’t eaten most of the day—we thought we’d arrive earlier than we did—and were so tired and exhausted it was hard to think straight. We’d planned to order curtains for all the windows, but went to the wrong store. So we have paper taped over the lower halves of the windows.

The windows have 3 parts—an outside window, bars or a heavy wire mesh imbedded into the cement of the house walls, and an inner double screen. Both the screen and the windows can be open which allows a nice air flow. We close the screens at dusk when the mosquitoes come out. We haven’t had a problem with them, but we do take our malaria pills daily.