Getting Settled

 I have this journal call "What a Difference a Year makes.  You write a little bit every day and then you can compare to a year ago!  I found this one very interesting! Exactly one year apart! (excuse the sloppy handwriting)

This is the gate to our compound.  There is a guard there 24 hours a day.  When you pull up to the gate, you honk and they open it for you!  Our house is the one you can see, right next to the road.

This is the driveway of the compound and on Friday, all of our teams furniture and house hold goods (dishes, sheets, towels, small appliances, trash cans) were delivered. This is just one of 4 deliveries that was made. They were 6 weeks late in being delivered because they were ordered and shipped from South Africa and the process to get them here is insane.  Basically they were being held in customs waiting for a bribe to get them out.  Our guy here that Westland has hired has all sorts of connections and eventually he got it released without a bribe being paid!  We were lucky and got here the day before, everyone else has been here almost a month with out all these things.

Here is our bedroom.  We got our TV set up so we could watch a movie, and we were able to watch one. The next day our internet went out and hasn't been up since. We also had to make a curtain out of a flat sheet until those arrive because our window/door looks out over the road and we need some privacy!

This is our dining/living room.  It is very bare and the couches are the most uncomfortable things we have ever sat on!  There is no give in the cushions but they do just fine I guess!

Our kitchen is perfect for what we need.  Behind where I am standing is our pantry and on the other side of the sink, behind the window, is our outdoor laundry.  We have to hang our clothes to dry and like I said earlier, there is smoke in the air all the time so that will be interesting.  It actually reminds me of when we had the fire's 4 years ago and all of Woodland Hill, Elk Ridge and Salem was full of smoke.  Ash is constantly falling from the sky here. 

This is my back splash in my kitchen...I have to laugh every time I look at it.  It gives Anne Geddes circa 1990 vibes!  And, the fact that they are all white babies in a very non white county is even funnier!