Flat Sweet Flat

We live in an area called Nyali. We are told that Nyali is the rich part of Mombassa. We do live in a gated community but it’s not what you imagine. Our neighborhood is near the Nyali movie theatre and that is where we get off the matatu (Public transportation). From there we walk along a dirt path through a field which seems to serve as a community dump and where we often find goats grazing. We walk past the family who lives under the big tree and a small Muslim church with corrugated steel for a roof. Then we cross a small paved road and arrive at our community’s outer gate. From there it is just a short walk along the dirt road to our building’s gate.

The road home... Our building taken from the trash pile. We are the top, right balcony.

We have a security guard that always greets us as we enter and leave our building. Just outside the gate is where our trash it burned three times a week. We just leave it on the pile and the care taker burns it. This is one of the many smells that floats through our apartment during the day. Our building has a cement parking area on the ground floor where the children in the building play. We often watch them from our balcony and enjoy to see them having fun in the cool evenings.

Our apartment is extremely nice by Kenyan standards. We have two bathrooms, three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a sitting room. We have running water but not heated water and a sink and line up on the roof for laundry. We have two gas burners which use a propane tank. We can’t drink the water from the tap but we buy big containers of water and we have a dispenser in the kitchen. You will know how nice our apartment is comparatively by remembering or re-reading the post from the 17th of March where we talked about visiting our friends at their home in Likoni. The overwhelming majority of Kenyans live like our friends in Likoni and very many live much worse.

The sitting room/dining room.

The kitchen and the bathroom.

The neighbors that we have met have been very nice. One neighbor, Sofi, even brought us some nyama choma (grilled animal – precise animal unknown).

Things we don’t have that we are all used to: a garbage disposal, laundry machines, air conditioning, an oven (not that we could use it in the heat) a normal sized refrigerator, hot water, TV, internet, and carpet.

Things that we do have that we’re not used to: a sink for laundry, mosquito nets to sleep in, four fans (two blowing directly on each of us) to keep us cool enough to sleep at night, common power failure, lots of bugs eating our food, and the occasional lizard.

Despite these differences we are getting along just fine and we’re gaining a greater appreciation for all that we have.