It’s early Sunday morning. I’ve been up to water our garden and am now relaxing in my room at our Expat house.

When I imagined expat (expatriate) life, I never thought the living conditions would be as they are. I had pictured hot, sweaty Africa, living in a tukul (mud hut with a thatched roof), and sleeping under mosquito netting. Our house in Tajikistan is far from that image.

We live in a walled compound. The SE corner has a building with 4 bedrooms, what is currently our laundry/ironing room but will become a TV room before winter, and a community bathroom, complete with western toilet, sink, and hot water shower. I currently occupy the master bedroom of this suite, which comes with a king size bed, an armoire designed for a king, and its own bathroom – well, a toilet and tub/shower, but no sink. (It’s not uncommon here for the tub to double as a sink, so that’s where I brush my teeth and wash my hands.) The furnishings, I have to say, make me laugh. They are meant to suggest opulence, but they are over the top gaudy to me, with the toilet taking the cake. To each their own, though. I showed this photo to another expat and she thought the toilet was beautiful.

Along the south wall of the compound are two more bedrooms, each with doors to the outside, like a motel. Neither have a bathroom, so those expats have the pleasure of walking across the courtyard to the bathrooms, which are on the north wall of the compound (okay in summer but next winter – brrrrr!) I say rooms, because one room has a traditional squatting toilet and a sink, the next room has a western toilet, and the next room has a shower and tub, along with the washing machine. Heading east through that chain of rooms, one comes to the sauna room (complete with Soviet era boiler). Crazy!

Coming back outside and continuing east, is a storage room with a rickety ladder up to one of our two water tanks. The next room is our kitchen, furnished with cheap everything because very sadly that’s all that’s available here. (Side comment – in my travels to developing countries I’ve not been surprised to see the quality of merchandise available – one would expect poor because the community doesn’t have much money. But it fries me to see the prices on this cheap merchandise. People making $1-2/hour save hard for this crap, which often breaks quickly.)

Off of the kitchen is a small sitting room where we currently have our TV. It shows mostly Russian programming – well, actually it shows a fair bit of American programming too – but dubbed over in Russian. Last night, though, after nearly 2.5 months here, I actually sat down to watch TV and found undubbed AMC, which was screening Seven Years in Tibet. Hooray for movie night – in English!

Farther along the north wall is another storage room and then the open area where our generator lives.

The east and west walls are just that – walls – with the gate to our compound on the west wall. In the center of the compound is a lovely courtyard, complete with grape arbor, apple, mulberry, apricot, cherry and plum trees, all of which are producing right now. In fact yesterday, I picked plums to make my favorite plum torte (thank you New York Times and Jean Sullivan). However, I had to laugh. Full marks for effort, but the end result was a bit of a disappointment. With no measuring cups/spoons and an unleveled oven with broken temperature controls (sigh – poor quality strikes again), the finished product was roundly burned on the edges and not quite done in the middle. Still – that middle part is delicious!

Our courtyard also contains a land-of-the-giants garden swing, a fountain (which we don’t run because the water noise is so loud), our vegetable garden, and a SWIMMING POOL! PHOTOS Yes, a swimming pool! It’s a wacky above ground thing that I started to fill a few weeks ago. But because we have water from the city just twice a day – for a few hours in the morning and evening – the priorities for our pump are filling our two water tanks and, now, watering the garden. When I return from vacation and training in mid-July, I’ll attempt to fill it again. It will provide welcome relief from the daily temps in the 90s and 100s.

Why do we have such accommodations, you might be asking? I certainly was when I came to the project. From what I can tell, this was a nicer home, built during the Soviet era by someone with resources. Since the end of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan’s fortunes have fallen, and it is now the poorest country in central Asia. Most things are in disrepair, and housing options that provide enough bedrooms and meet MSF’s safety standards for us is limited.  The rent we pay is quite low, and lower than other NGOs in the area. So, given the options here in Kulob and our selection parameters, my predecessors chose this home.

We five expats hail from 4 continents and countries. Omar, Russian, is the Project Coordinator, which is the project leader. He’s in his second week on the job. His predecessor, Endesh from Ethiopia just finished his mission and is back home now. Patrick, our doctor, hails from Rwanda. Rebecca, our nurse and infectious diseases specialist is from Brazil. Kathy, our mental health officer is from New York City, and I am the Logistics All Around person, meaning I manage HR and finance, in addition to logistics.  More on all of those things soon, as well as the purpose of our being here. For now, it’s time to prepare for my afternoon activity – working with Omar to bring him up to speed on our project activities and budget. While I don’t work every weekend, sometimes it happens. I’m lucky to do so in the confines of our lovely compound.