is it true? another post so soon??

Yes, it's true--two posts in two days. I'm taking full advantage of being in Mpwapwa, our shopping/banking/computer town. We'll go home tomorrow or the next day--still need to gets lots of stuff for our house.
So what's a typical day like in the town on Kibakwe? Glad you asked--here goes: wake up before sunrise because of crowing roosters and horns from buses and people talking outside our house as they wait to fill buckets of water from the nearby pump. Start fire in our jiko (charcoal grill), boil water for tea/coffee/drinking later in the day. Wash faces in plastic basin and brush teeth with boiled water; eat fruit and bread baked the day before on jiko. House helpers come over at 10am (two young men in their 20s--everyone has house help in Tanzania) to wash clothes, sweep/mop floors, run errands, dig gardens, practice speaking Kiswahili/English together. After they leave, usually between 2 and 3 in the afternoon, Tony and I read, study, write and talk for a while, have a snack (bread or fruit), take a walk into town and visit people, then maybe make bread and start preparing the evening meal. This means soaking beans, washing rice and chopping veggies. We can usually only buy tomatoes and onions in Kibakwe, but sometimes cabbage and okra and peppers, and I bought 5 carrots a few days ago. I also can usually buy bananas and papaya every day, but more veggies will come later in the year when the rains start, which is usually November--that's why we come to Mpwapwa to shop, because you can get a LOT more here: carrots, eggplant, potatoes, pineapple, oranges, mangoes, spinach, coconut, lentils, different beans, garlic, spices, honey. Coming to Mpwapwa to buy food feels like shopping at Whole Foods now--wow! Cooking takes a couple hours, and we try to eat before dark because we don't have electricity yet. The sun sets at 7pm every day, and this is usually the time we're eating; we light our kerosene lamps and candles, eat, then wash dishes in our plastic basins. Then we heat a kettle of water for our shower, which Tony constructed out of a plastic bucket and some rope, suspended from a rafter in our bafu ("bathing room"); we take a shower (most Tanzanians take bucket baths, which means bathing with a bucket of water and cup to pour it over your body--but we prefer showers), lock up our house (four rooms arranged around a tiny courtyard), climb into bed under our mosquito net, read for a while with flashlights, then go to sleep around 9pm. That's a typical day for right now--after we start doing projects and we're much busier, we will be out of our house much more, and might hire someone to cook lunch for us--this kind of house helper is called a "House Mama." Cooking takes forever, and we really like to do it, but I'm guessing that when we're actually working, we won't have as much time. Once we have electricity, we will buy a hot plate, and that will make the cooking process faster, too, but baking bread and cake will always be done on our charcoal grill. Too bad we love bread and cake so much!!
So how are we feeling? Honestly, it's up and down. Some days are good and some aren't; for that matter, some moments are good and some aren't. We have made some excellent friends, both in the Peace Corps Volunteer community and within our town (obviously, the town friends are new friends); there are 12 of us volunteers total in the district of Mpwapwa, and we are separated by bad roads and many kilometers, but we love and support each other--these people are our built-in families here, and we get together as often as possible. Our closest Peace Corps friend is Ben, a 23 year old writer from Kentucky, and he lives 11 kilometers away from our house, so we see each other at least once a week. We all have cell phones and text each other every day. We are healthy and safe, and are eager to see how our projects develop. We might get a dog, and will plant flowers. Will we stay here for the whole two years?? Don't know yet--we take it one day at a time.
What do we long for? Magazines, salty snacks from the US, really good skin lotion (we live in the desert, and it's drought time right now!), proper cleaning products, dark chocolate ALWAYS, scented candles, hair accessories for my growing hair. Simple things that bring so much comfort. As someone in Peace Corps once said: we can usually buy what we need but never what we want.
It feels like a struggle trying to balance living as my neighbors do but having comforts of a developed world (electricity, for example, and flowers just for the sake of beauty in a land of terrible drought.) Our closest neighbors have satellite dishes and tv, but we won't. We work very hard every day to find our path here.