Here are some long-overdue photos of my house at post, cleaned and dressed up for the holidays.  As you can see, the floors are bare concrete.  The walls are also concrete, but I had them painted a few months after I moved in to make the place look nicer.  There isn’t any running water or plumbing, but it’s a very nice house by middle-class standards in Benin.  (If you’re wondering what my latrine looks like, picture a cement slab with a square hole in the middle, surrounded by walls of concrete and scrap metal.)  I have electricity, but it doesn’t power my stove.  The two large orange canisters that you see on the floor in my kitchen are gas tanks for the stove.  If I didn’t sleep under that blue mosquito net, I’d get eaten alive by mosquitoes every night.  There’s no glass on the windows, only mosquito netting and wooden shutters.  The front and back doors also have screen doors with mosquito netting.

Here’s my house from the outside:

My House

Two views of my living room:

Living Room 1

 

Another of my bedroom:

Bedroom

 The second bedroom (which I use as a kitchen – most Beninese people would cook outdoors, in their front yards):