Our daily hang-out spot

This is Joyce’s kitchen building. She cooks in the room on the left, while we cook in the open air room on the left. We spend a lot of our time in this little shelter. It functions as our dining room and our office where we do language learning, and it is also a social area.

When I am sitting inside the shelter doing some language study, I just need to turn my head to the left and I have this beautiful view of the ocean (and another kitchen building).

At night we also sit in this kitchen shelter with our Coleman lamp lighting it up. We spend a lot of time in this humble little building. It has a grass roof over the dining area, so it is much cooler than inside the house with its tin roof. The house is just for sleeping and storing possessions really.

Don’t burn the house down!!

This weekend was the first time we cooked/prepared all our meals in our haus kuk. Sara and I decided to only cook dinner and have an easy breakfast and lunch. I’m having muesli for all my weekend breakfasts, lunches will vary, but on Saturday I had a cheese and tomato sandwich – the first one I’ve had since I’ve been here!

We had stir-fry for dinner (my specialty!) and my famous banana crumble for dessert, cooked over the fire – it turned out well.

Anyway, now for the exciting part! I used the kerosene stove to prepare part of the banana crumble and turned it off when I had finished. After I cut up the vegies, I was ready to boil them, so I turned the kerosene stove on again and tried to light it. I had left some pressure in it from before, so too much kerosene was coming through and I had this massive flame coming up from the stove. It was getting really high and the flames were licking the plastic tarp covering. It was rather scary! I ended up getting some oven gloves and getting it out of the hauk kuk, tipped over on the ground and it managed to die. So that was a bit of an ordeal.

I had a second attempt, this time with the stove outside the haus kuk and I still had the same problems and lack of success. Then I went and asked for help, which resolved the problem as he got it lit for me. The next day when I had to light it again, I managed okay, so hopefully I’ve got that sorted now.

Haus kuks

A “haus kuk” is literally a house where you cook, or to put it more simply, a kitchen.

We each had to build ourselves a “haus kuk”. I worked with the other single girls to build one. The local men demonstrated how to build one and then we were let loose with our axes and machetes! We were given a bundle of wood and bamboo and we cut some wood to size and some was already the right size.

We built a table like a picnic table and we also made a bench for food preparation and for washing dishes.

We are going to be preparing all our weekend meals in our “haus kuks”, starting this weekend. It will help prepare us for our five weeks living in a village.

We will probably actually cook our food outside of our “haus kuks” so that they don’t get all smoky as we will be cooking over a fire. We will also have a kerosene stove to use.

We won’t have any refrigeration or modern appliances, so it will probably be pretty tricky to cook things that would normally be easy to cook.

The three of us standing in the “haus kuk” that we built:

Inside our “haus kuk”: