Hut Sweet Hut

First, there's no news on the adoption front. However, 2 families got referrals today (congrats to the Avella's and Solt's!!!!!), which leads us to believe that things are once again moving with our adoption agency! Maybe we'll be hearing something soon...

I wanted to give you an idea of what our hut was like in Zambia. After getting some land from the headman, we hired the pastor of one of our churches (a 65 year old man named Robinson, who liked to be called "Master Builder" through the entire process!) to build our hut. Things move slow in Zambia, and it took 3 months for him to get it built. During this time, we camped out in a tent on our land and became very accustomed to bush life! Our hut was a 9 foot by 27 foot building that had 3 rooms. You walked into the sitting room, the left room was our room, and the right was the guest room/eventually baby room.



This was the "sitting room"


This was our bedroom


Our next step was to build a kitchen hut for cooking. We decided to make this a large circular area with short walls to allow the smoke to escape. We did our dishes here, did all of our cooking here, and sat out around the fire at night.


This is me sweeping the kitchen with a grass broom. You can tell I was in a rebellious "I hate Africa" mood this day because I am wearing pants, which was a big no-no!!


Something we miss so much is taking showers outside under the stars. We had a large barrel that we had a faucet welded to. Then, we had a welder build us a metal box that had an opening it where we could start a fire. We would start a fire around 4pm each day to heat the water in the barrel. If the barrel was full, it would last us about 3 days. Sometimes we would heat the water too early in the day and it would be boiling and we would have to skip showers for the night! Other times we would forget and have cold showers--I can remember being the coldest I've ever been during one of those showers!


Something I don't miss so much is our bush toilet. For most of the time we were there, it was just a hole in the ground in a little grass enclosure. This, however, is a nice cement "toilet" that we made since a volunteer team was coming. Oh man do I have some funny stories about trying to show my mom and mother-in-law how to use this.... :) When I was pregnant and had to use the bathroom 2-3 times a night, I was too scared to go outside by myself, so I would wake up Blu and make him take a flashlight outside and guard the door for me!


There were so many days when I just hated the bush so much. I was tired of the heat, the flies, and the lack of privacy. Some days now, though, when it's really crazy and I rarely see my husband and I struggle to keep up with the American pace of life, I would do anything to go back and sit outside in the kitchen hut with our best friend Mulenga, telling stories and looking at the stars.