New House!!!

So, we’ve finally moved into our new house!!! And it’s wonderful. It took us forever to find though. It’s just Ben, Katy, and I here, so it was difficult to find something within our price range. Tameshia is staying with her homestay family like she told us months ago (which, I can’t blame her. They have a fridge and a microwave and an oven  and a stove and their house is freaking gorgeous), but the other two backed out on us at the last second, so that was a bit of a financial setback. But it’s ok, because we found the most wonderful house! It’s in Nyamirambo , which is like the ghetto/Harlem of Kigali, I hear. Basically, it’s the most alive and awesome part of the city. It’s also old Kigali or the old city center, so it has a lot of character. There are actually lots of people out at night, the streets are lined with stores (alimentations, dress shops, clothing stores, music stores/studios, milk shops, fruit stands, street food, etc.), and it just has such a great atmosphere. And the buses there are super cheap. It’s the Muslim part of the city as well, which is great because every night twice a night we hear about ten calls to prayer from different mosques nearby. One has to be maybe a quarter mile away, it’s so loud. It’s wonderful :) We also live fairly close to the Baha’i Center, which I really want to check out sometime. Baha’is are like the UUs of the middle east, in a sense, so that’s awesome. And for those of yall who are as worried as my mother (love you!), we have a security guard and a gated, glass shard encrusted, walled off compound, so we’re safe. Stop worrying.

So the house! It has a big open living room/dining room/kitchen area, spare room which currently holds our shoes, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a balcony. The balcony looks out over this gorgeous view of several hills and neighborhoods. We’re hoping to get a good sunrise or sunset in soon :) It’s all furnished, so we have a tv, dvd player, fridge, oven, stove, a table, chairs, couches, beds, and bedding. It’s basically heaven. And my bed is super comfy. And I have my own bathroom. It’s incredible.

We’re definitely enjoying cooking for ourselves too. So far, we’ve made coffee, tea, omelets, toast, rice, green beans and carrots with angel sauce (what we’ve taken to calling this peanut-tomato sauce), and green plantain chips. I’m making stir fry tonight because, guess what—I found tofu!!! That’s right. Dream protein in Rwanda. I’m super excited. It’s at Simba in the produce section just in case anyone else is interested.

My helpers taught me how to cook last week, which was great. We made matoke (green plantains), tomato and peanut sauce, rice, ugali (corn flower and water cooked into a really thick…mound, for lack of a better word), and…maybe something else. Cooking in Rwanda makes me realize how many cooking tools we have in America. Here, a knife suffices for pretty much everything—peeling, slicing, chopping, dicing, everything. The part that took the longest though was definitely grinding the peanuts for the sauce. We used this giant mortar and pestle, crushed them for a few minutes, poured them over a sieve, sifted out the powder, poured the rest back, and crushed them again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Several, several times. But it was all delicious and so definitely worth it.