This morning, while Jon is still sleeping, I am sitting on our porch, overlooking our yard, and then the city below. I am listening to the birds in the trees in our yard and our neighbors’ yards, the occasional boda-boda driving by outside with their motors cranking hard up the hill, and their motors turned off as they coast back down, and the faint noise of Kampala in the morning. Our house is out of the fray, but a three minute walk down the hill puts us into the Kintintale market and a mess of matatu taxis, special hire taxis, and boda-bodas. On Sunday music started early in the church at the bottom of the hill and was still going when we went to sleep last night. We love where we live.

Oh it feels good to finally have a home after two and a half months of living out of suitcases in hotels.

This weekend, Jon and I made huge strides in changing what was just us and a mattress in a big, empty house into a place that is ours and that we can call home. There are still a few pieces to come, including internet and our bed, but we are getting so close.

Friday evening, while Jon was at the TEDC dinner plugging Appfrica and making some really good contacts, I began cleaning the house. I can’t figure out why, but every surface in the house was filthy. After a trip to Uchumi, a local Safeway/Kroger equivalent to buy a trunk-load of cleaning supplies, I began cleaning the kitchen. Using a sponge and some soapy water, I washed the cabinets, and drawers, got all of our dishes out of their boxes, washed them, and put them into their new homes, and then swept and mopped. A kitchen!

Then I moved on to the closets in the bedrooms, which required similar treatments, and I scrubbed the bathrooms, and mopped them, too. Jon came home as I was unpacking my bags into my closet (we each have our own closets in the Kampala house!) and swept and mopped the rest of the house. Success!

Saturday was more of the same. Jon and I had breakfast (our first meal cooked in the new house) on the porch in our little lawn chairs, and then we swept and mopped the porch. I unpacked the remainder of the bags into the guestroom (where our medicine cabinet, Scrabble, and my yoga mat now live), and the office (where countless cords and hard drives now reside).

Sunday was our big day. Jon and I made a list of the things that we still needed in order to complete our house. We took a very long trip to Game, a South African department store with a little bit of everything at fairly high prices. We were willing to pay for the convenience of a one-stop shop. Although there were a few things that were still missing after our hour and a half spree, and 770,000 UGX later, we accomplished a lot. Among our accomplishments was the buying of several garden tools that Godfrey, our guard cum gardener, is using in the yard next to where I’m sitting.

Our next mission was a kitchen table. There’s a furniture place that Jon and I pass each time we go into and out of town. I had seen some pretty kitchen chairs there that I had never been able to successfully point out to Jon. We found our way to the store (not as easy as one might think), and I pointed out the chairs that I liked. Jon liked them too, and they happened to be sitting around a pretty table that we immediately took a liking to. It’s a large, square table with rounded edges. Both the table and the chairs are made of a light-colored wood, and it’s pretty striking, we think. Our interest was too high starting out to have much in the way of bargaining power, but we liked it enough to buy it anyway. We later learned that the guy who sold us the table and delivered it ran off with the money we paid him and never returned to the shop. We were warned to be careful. My immediate reaction (though not sensitive in the slightest, and I later checked myself) was, “Well, that’s a drag, but not really our problem is it?” But of course our direct problem or not, it’s a pretty strong statement on the state of things.

Once decided on the table and the deal done, we loaded the table into a hired pick-up truck, and we followed it home. We had meant to lead the way, but our taxi driver drove too slowly for the guys in the truck—a good quality in a taxi driver, but now when you’re trying to show people where your house is. We figured it out, and the guys loaded the table and chairs into the house. At the same time, Jon and I unloaded our wares from Game.

Then we were off to Gaba Road. On our first day in Kampala, Jon and I went to the US Embassy to register ourselves as present in the country, and more importantly, register to vote. On our way there, we passed stand after stand after stand of virtually a sea of furniture. A lot of it was ugly, but we decided to head back there yesterday to see what we could find.

I think that we were both a little surprised at the quality of the furniture that we saw when we got out of the taxi. Jon quickly found a sofa set that he liked. But since it was the first stand that we talked with, we decided to take a walk up and down the row a little. Immediately across the street from that stall, we found what is now our porch furniture. It’s light and made out of reads. It’s covered in an orange, sand, and brown print depicting life in Africa. We also found a little matching coffee table. At the same place, we found a shelving unit for the bathroom, so now have a place to put our toothbrushes and various bathroom paraphernalia. We loaded all of that into a truck and asked it to wait while we continued looking.

We continued our walk down Gaba Road and found two desks that we like. We put those in a truck and then road with it to the top of the hill where our other truck and taxi were parked. At the top of the hill Jon and I went back to the first place we saw our sofa set, but while looking for that set, came across another that we liked equally well (and I liked better). It’s a sand-colored set, with a three-seat sofa and two matching chairs. It’s all leatherette or some such thing. The craftsmanship isn’t stellar, but it’s totally functional and by far the least ugly stuff we found. We loaded all of that into the pick-up with the desks (because there’s no such thing as a full truck), gave half-understood instructions to the drivers, got into our taxi, and crossed our fingers.

When finally everyone made it to the house, we unloaded everything into the house and—ah-ha! A home!

We’re thrilled with our new home.

Written by Sarah in Life ~ CommentsMaking+a+House+a+Home2008-08-04+13%3A40%3A55Sarah