One infitessimally small step for mankind, one giant leap for me...

First, some relevant background:
In addition to setting me up in the aforementioned house, TCRS employs a woman (an angel, really) who comes to the house during the week and takes care of things like going to the market, cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry. I realize that probably sounds a bit excessive (and despite what I say here, I'm still getting used to it myself...), but bear in mind that 1. this sort of thing is par for the course in most Tanzanian households and 2. I don't know the first thing about cooking the sorts of dishes that are made here. Plus, even though I did do my own laundry when I stayed in Dar before, it was always with the nagging suspicion that what I was doing wasn't as much cleaning my clothes as it was swishing them around in a bucket of dirty (albeit slightly sudsy) water. And as for whether or not I ever managed to completely rinse those suds out? Probably never. So Prisca is amazing. Both in the sense that she saves me from myself (i.e. - ineffective laundering) and she is a fantastic cook. However, she gets the weekends off (and deservedly so), which leaves me with two options as far as feeding myself goes on Saturdays and Sundays. The first involves carefully rationing the food Prisca cooked on Friday so that it lasts throughout the weekend. The second brings me to my big piece of news from this past weekend:

I COOKED! Since my deficiencies when it comes to any non-baking culinary activities are pretty well established and since there is no microwave for me to fall back on in my kitchen here, I figured this would be moderately surprising news for almost everyone who knows me. However, what made this achievement blog-worthy in my opinion, was that this was my "stove":
Yes, it is sitting on a chair. And in order to light it, you have to dismantle it almost completely, light about a dozen wicks, and then carefully put it back together without extinguishing the flames. I realize that the chair-stove is still a pretty big step-up from a whole slew of more primitive cooking apparatuses, but it's also no microwave, so I was feeling rather pleased with myself while I ate dinner last night...and was still basking in the glow of my small success this morning when it occurred to me that nothing I'd eaten had made me sick. Hooray for the little things!