Q&A Part 3

What is the plumbing like - do you have running water in the houses?

We have a tap that we get water from outside and a ton of buckets full of water in the house that everyone uses for cooking and washing and drinking. Every few days our dada fills them all up again after the water has been used. I'll grab pictures of it for the next post :) Our toilet doesnt have running water and neither does the house itself. I'm pretty sure there's no septic tank so it's a little bit of a mystery but i'm happy with it being that way :P

Do they drink it or is it just for bathing?

Yea they drink the water from our tap outside but we dont - we buy bottled water because theres no way we have enough time to get used to it here. Their water isnt filtered nearly as much as ours is .. In the villages they just drink water right out of the streams coming from the mountains which is pretty neat to see

Are there septic tanks where there are toilets?, like in the restaurants you go to?

Restaurants all usually have sit-down luxury toilets and running water and all that jazz but anywhere average doesnt have anything like that... Again, the plumbing is kinda a mystical entity and i'm keeping it that way :P

Will you get a chance to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro…is there snow on the peak this time of year?

We didn't climb Kili but we were in Moshi town what's about 20 km from the gate to Kilimanjaro National Park. Sadly because it's winter its reeeally cloudy a lot of the time especially around the mountains so we didnt get to see it. Because it's the middle of winter here I would imagine there is snow on the top right now, but climbs take a minimum of 5 days up Kili and they're also very expensive.

As a side note, Kilimanjaro means something like "little hill up to the top" because it's such a gradual climb. We learned that a while ago :)

Explain the kitchen!!

Everyone was asking me a lot to explain what all that was in the post before hahah. Basically there's a big can that's "the stove" and they light coal fires in it for cooking. The pots and pans are just stored against the wall and food is always bought fresh every day. We have a fridge but it's just used to keep their drinking water cold most of the time or for cooling down fresh cut fruit for desserts on occasion. All the utensils they use are just hung on the wall or stored behind our Dada's bed. They really don't use anything else. It's very basic but the food is 10000x better than in Canada.

How do you do your laundry?

One bucket has soapy water, one has normal water, and a clothes line hangs up beside me :) haha.. That's pretty much it! I brought a brush that I use to clean our any stains but that's pretty much the whole process. I'm also not very good at it so everything I own here (which is all too big for me now anyways....) will need a few cycles in a washing machine when I get home I'm sure :P