Domestic bliss... is ignorance

Blog #2

We didn’t even make it out of the Heathrow airport before the first wrench was thrown in our machine.  Bridget couldn’t make the plane in time with all of her stuff (including a lot of our equipment), so she had to take the next flight out 24 hours later.  Good thing we weren’t cutting any ribbons afterall.

Raymond met us at the airport, helped charm our equipment through customs and took us to our home for the next two months.  Great house with a walled property, huge backyard garden, each our own room and (bonus!) electricity and water that works most of the time.  In other words, a total score.

We have a groundskeeper/gatekeeper named Mateo who makes up for his inability to communicate in English or French by always greeting us with an infectious smile and pleasant attitude.  To top it all off, our landlady even brought us a crate of juice and a basket of fruit the first night. Cockroaches, power outages and ungodly noises in the night seem to greet us whenever life gets too comfortable, but aren’t enough to remind us how well off we are here, relatively speaking.  Our greatest challenge tends to be cooking meals that accommodate a vegetarian (Bridget), a carnivore (moi) and a 5’1 ominvore (Sabrina) who seems to be able to survive off eating less than the kids we meet daily on the street.

Our first few days were spent exploring the city, taking in the beach, seeing some terrifying crocodiles and snakes close-up at the « musee vivant », negotiating our way through the intensely intimidating city market and already enjoying the world famous Burundian drummers play on multiple occasions.  We’re settling into an environment that is unsettling at the best of times. And regardless of our efforts to first aclimatize ourselves in our new surroundings, the work ahead looms with every passing hour. We’ve hid from it as long as we can, but time is up – « ready or not, here we come »…