We lived in a wooden house on the school campus. We had a living/dining room, 2 bedrooms, a kitchen, and a pantry. We had two doors and multiple windows. The photo shown below is in our living/dining room at the table. We spent most of our time at this table, where we prepared lessons, graded papers, read our novels, wrote letters, listened to the BBC on our short wave radio, listened to cassettes and ate. The hanging baskets were used to store various items above the floor.
Sochoi is located at about 3000 meters above sea level. The climate is perfect, warm during the day, cool at night, and relatively dry. We always slept with at least several blankets and sometimes even needed our down sleeping bags.
We could see the girls dormitory from our dining room window. On sunny sundays the girls would do their laundry in buckets outside their dorm (shown below). The school sheep are shown grazing nearby and usually they ate grass but sometimes they had a taste for clothing or soap. So the excuses were real (though it took them awhile to convince David) when the students told David that they could not exercise after class because their games kits (gym clothes) had been eaten by the cows.
Actually, we were Kirsten's people. She lived outdoors except when she had kittens, which was 3 times during our stay there. She was a sweet and very intelligent cat. Kirsten was a fantastic huntress and would leave kidneys (she must not have liked their taste) regularly in our bath house or bring her kills to show us. She showed up at our house the night we arrived. We opened the window to let in fresh air and she jumped in. I (Uma) screamed, as we had been made aware of the dangers of rabies during our PC training and I was really scared. Eventually, we brought rabies vaccine from Nairobi and David inoculated her. We would hold her in our arms like a baby and kiss her, which struck our students as very strange behavior. But they accepted us for our eccentric behavior.