Welcome to my villa

These are my big fancy metal gates. Apparently Americans are the only ones who aren’t really into the gated entryway thing.

Here’s my yard and the villa itself. The small building on the left is my kitchen, which will be shown separately.

Here is a front view of the kitchen building :

And this is the inside. I think it’s kind of like cooking on a gas grill, except there are burners. Needless to say, I don’t anticipate cooking a whole lot while I’m here. I like cooking, but I'm probably not THAT hardcore.

This next picture is my living room ; off to the front right out of view is a mini-fridge and the rest of a big kitchen table that I’ve been using as my workspace. This room tends to get really hot, but there’s a floor fan and a ceiling fan that help cool it down. I’m a bit afraid to leave the door open, since I’m not really in the mood to chase a bat or the little lizards I see running around everywhere out of my house.

This is my bedroom. For those who know something about bed nets, don’t worry – this was just the first night, then they nailed wooden stakes into the bed posts and put up a full size rectangular net for me (I wasn’t expecting all these full beds in Burkina, the net I brought was for a twin). The wonderful thing to note here is that on the upper left of this picture is an air conditioner, and it works pretty well.

I didn’t bother to take a picture of the bathroom because, well, bathrooms, but I am happy to report that it has a legit toilet (which, after some of the places I have experienced in the last few days, is something worth noting). It’s one of those all-in-one bathroom shower things, so the shower head is just there, hanging out on the wall adjacent to the toilet and sink. It has two settings: on, and off. I tested it out for the first time last night (don’t judge me, the water keeps getting cut anyway so even if I had wanted to shower I couldn’t have). It was cold, but bearable. Certainly speeds me up. The upside of the water being cut is that it’s pretty hard to accidentally start brushing your teeth with tap water when there is no tap water, so that has helped me adjust to the water bottle toothbrushing pretty easily.

So there you have it, my villa for this month. By Burkina standards, I think this just about qualifies as the silver spoon treatment. My suspicions were confirmed after learning that an MP lives next door. All in all, it really just feels like I’m camping. Actually, to be specific, it feels like I’m back at Bristol Hills Music Camp in a way, which makes things strangely comforting.