Road to Rwanda------Setting Up

 

(VVA friends who are reading this blog, please, please, do not think that we are casting dispersions on our living arrangements, or dissatisfied living here.  We are very happy in Rwanda. But we want friends back “home” to understand why we need prayer.  We also want them to have a fuller understanding of the things that many face when moving overseas.)

 

I wrote in passing to my sister and good childhood friend (which I do every day) that the there were many difficulties in adjusting to our apartment.  My sister asked me to share the difficulties.  She was quite astounded at the kind of things that are involved in setting up a living space in an overseas setting and said she thought we had never had it so difficult before.  We assured her that these kinds of things were not uncommon, but that many times no one shares them.  I decided, at the risk that people may think that we are being Ugly Americans, to list some of the problems we have attempted to solve over the last few days.

First of all is internet access.  This is never easy. Get a new phone or change SIM cards in an old one, which for a non-techy is horrendous.  (Here we at first have tried to reuse our phone from China, which means much of the operating system is in Chinese, and because of difficulties between countries things like What’sApp is not going to download.) So we also have just bought another phone here.  Which also involves another whole process of officially registering your SIM card with your passport at a different official office and only one per person. Then set up a hotspot which works only moderately well and seemingly not at night at all. Wait for a connection to a true internet company, which is going to cost us a fourth again as much as the rent for our apartment!!!...granted, the rent for our apartment is quite cheap.  We are waiting for that set up to occur and may wait quite a few days yet.

Then there is the apartment. We are in a very nice, brand new 2 bedroom apartment.  But it is not set up for Westerners.  Let me list a few of the differences. You stand in the shower to see the bathroom mirror to wash your face.  We finally found the hot water heater, which needs to be turned on half an hour before you need hot water and then turned back off, but ours is not working at all, so waiting to see what can be done.  The cold water pipe into the bathroom sink is leaking, so if I turn it on, then there is water all over the floor.  The towel bar is so high that I cannot reach it without tiptoes.  The toilet paper dispenser is inconveniently distant while on the toilet. There is no storage space to set your toothpaste or make up. You can’t drink the water, so you need to find a space to set a glass or bottle of filtered water so you can rinse your mouth out after brushing.  You get the picture?

But much more difficult is the kitchen.  We are back to a “one butt kitchen” like we had in China.  In other words, it is almost smaller than our bathroom.  There is only a two burner stove top included in the apartment, but we just bought a new stove with an oven last night.  Only to find that the oven does not have a temperature gauge on it, but rather just to turn on and off the top and bottom elements in the oven and I guess we just use an oven thermometer and adjust the temperature ourselves.  The refrigerator was very small and we did find another one which is adequate, but it does not fit in the space provided for the fridge, so it now sits around the corner from the kitchen in the dining/living room.  (When they took the smaller fridge away, the man took this fridge out, which is about chest high, and strapped it to the back of his bicycle and wheeled it away!!! I wish I took pictures.)  The cupboards are set at such an angle that some of the doors cannot be opened fully. Although there are a fair number of cupboards, they only have no shelf in them, which means the whole upper half of each cupboard is wasted.  The faucet is leaking and spraying water all over the curtains.  There are only two drawers in the kitchen, which cannot be opened fully if you have the fridge in the originally intended position. 

You get the picture?  I will write some other time about transport, filtered water, language, guard turning off the water, etc. etc.  Again, every person who has had to adjust to overseas living has faced at least some of these issues. These are not unique or even to some extent unexpected…but they sure are aggravating.  Pray.c