My Host Family Home

I thought for this blog post I would show you a bit of my host families home and tell you about what takes part in each picture!

The picture below is the taken right from the front door (katumba). Here in Fiji they call this the sitting room, but we would call it the living room. As you can notice there are no chairs except for the at the table. In a home there may or may not be any seating, but if the family has seating they will still sit on the floor. You can see a refrigerator in the background, which is sometimes found in homes. My room is off to the left side of the picture! The second picture below is taken from the kitchen entryway. You can also see my room a little bit! But I mostly wanted to show the TV stand because this is also typical of a home in Fiji. The family having a refrigerator or a TV is dependable if there is electricity and the income of the family. If you look on the floor you can see woven mats that are made by hand. These are very typical in homes especially in the sitting room. 

Next we move into the kitchen that you can see below. This kitchen has a sink area over to the right where we do our dishes by hand. In the back (the center of the picture) is where all the cooking is taken place. The kerosene stove and pots are all stored back here and where the women do the cooking. The reason I say women is because the men only cook in the lovo (earth oven). Over to the right side of the picture is the pantry where the salt, oil, some plates and miscellaneous kitchen things are kept.  You can also see the electric oven and frying pan on top of the table in one of the pictures below. 

Now we move onto the “bathroom” area. The shower (sisili) and toilet are separated here in Fiji into two separate rooms. The first picture you see is the shower room, which isn’t a shower room because the showerhead does not work! I take a bucket bath because the water pressure is not enough to go into the showerhead. The red handled bucket in the big green bucket is what I use to dump the water onto my body, and no it is not warm water at all! The cold water however does feel good with it being so hot here. The next picture is the toilet, which I can flush about once and then have to wait an hour or so for it to refill. Thank god I have not been sick yet (knock on wood) or else I would have a problem!!  

Well that’s about it for my host families home. Look forward to hearing about what you all think about this house and can’t wait to show you my home soon enough!!