Things take time in Africa

I love living in Africa, but there are many things that I have had to learn to do here that I wouldn't have at home, due to the lack of availability of items or just differences of living here etc. I thought I'd enlighten you all on some of the differences between living in England and living in Africa.

Washing up - at the moment our kettle is broken, so we heat water on the stove for washing up which takes quite a while. If we were motivated enough, we could install a heater for our kitchen sink, but it does not come fitted in African houses.

Clothes - handwashing everything takes a while, which is why we are so grateful to our househelp Mama Nick for doing it as part of her job 3 days a week. Unfortunately we still have to handwash our own underwear, but it would be unfair to give it to Mama Nick!

Preparing food - rice has to be picked through to remove stones, fruit and vegetables have to be washed thoroughly in purified water, meat never comes perfectly packaged so has to be dealt with (again, a job of Mama Nick's), any pasta apart from the packaged shell/tube shapes has to be made by hand (yay for our pasta machine, makes lasagne sheets so much easier!).

Bread products - I have only ever seen plain white bread being sold here in Musoma (not very tasty stuff) so everything else we want has to be made: bagels, cinnamon buns, tortillas, chapattis, muffins and crumpets are some of the items we have mastered since being here in our house.

Other random jobs - filling our water filters to make sure we have a constant supply of clean water needs to be done regularly, and cleaning it every few weeks is a priority. Keeping 2 buckets and our 100l storage tank full is a priority too, as we never know when the water will go off and we'll have to start using stored water (up to 2 days sometimes).

To be honest, we are very blessed, both in our househelp (Mama Nick is a very lovely woman and very good at her job, havin worked for Westerners before) and in our landlord who helps us with many things which go wrong with our house. Our house in itself is wonderful, but I wonder how weird it will be to go back to drinking water out of a tap, and buying anything you could ever want prepackaged from a supermarket!