A Tour of the Dorm

My bed and balcony

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The bathroom

The yard area between the dorms

The Washroom

So I thought I would give you all a little better idea of what life in the dorms is like.  So far, we have many pets here in Tanzania.  Karen has a pet lizard named Fernando who lives in the hole in her wall.  She wakes up every morning to the lizard staring straight at her face (there are tons of lizards here).  Colleen and I have discovered a black rat living in our communal trash can in our hallway.  That was kind of gross.  And this morning, we discovered that we are hosting a ton of ants in our room.  At the cafe, we have adopted a cat and have named him "Beans".  He likes fish, beans, rice, and pretty much whatever leftovers you feed him.  We also have two baby kittens living in our research methods classroom.  They barely have their eyes open and are adorable!  Outside, we have seen tons of monkeys, bushbabies, some butterflies, a few bees, and mosquitoes.  Overall, the bugs here aren't bad at all.  The only time the mosquitoes seem to come out is during the evening, and since we don't walk around at night, we haven't gotten bitten very much. 
As for our dorm, we are in one of the dorm buildings in "Hall 3".  There are 7 "halls" on campus and each "hall" has about 4 or 5 dorm buildings.  There are ten floors on our building and we often get tired of climbing the stairs even though we are only on the fourth floor.  Mama Jane is our hall warden and lives in a building next to ours, and we go to her when we have issues with our room (or when we lock ourselves out :).  There is always a guard sitting in front of our dorm to make sure that nothing suspicious is happening.  As far as the other people living in our dorm, there is a group from Germany, and a group from Korea.  During the summer I think that most of the people who live in the dorms are foreigners or on an abroad program.  So far, we have had some interaction with these other groups, but haven't gotten to know them very well.  On our floor we have about 5 rooms.  Each is a double and comes with two closets, two desks, a balcony, and if you are lucky, two chairs.  The windows only have screens on them and at night it can be quite loud..  Each floor has a washroom with two utility sinks and a bathroom with two toilets, three sinks, a bathtub, and a shower.  There is no hot water here so showers are always taken cold.  My favorite nook is at the end of the hallway by the fire escape.  The fire escape is a spiral staircase outside (it's super sketchy) but has a landing on each of the floors where I often eat my breakfast.  I have taken to eating Weetabix (think shredded wheat biscuits) and bananas for breakfast.  Milk here is expensive and hard to keep since we don't have refrigerators so I have taken to eating my cereal with water.  It's pretty disgusting at first, but hey, I've gotten used to it.  The weetabix kind of makes an oatmeal like mush when you mix it with water.  Maybe I'll get more creative a little later on.  Some of us do peanut butter and jelly for breakfast and others just snack on crackers and juice.  So far, our main staples here in Tanzania that we get from the store include peanut butter, bread, jelly, jackers (Tanzanian pringles), cookies, crackers, and mango juice.