In which I take my bedroom on a trip into town and get attacked by a tree-ful of mathenge

I figured out the reason for the always-being-late-ness of Africans. It’s not that they don’t care if they’re on time…it’s that nobody seems to be in the habit of checking what time it is! Thursday evenings we have Bible study in the church, and everyone’s supposed to go. It starts at 5:30. At 5:45 nobody’s gone, so I ask a couple peple if they’re going. They say yes. I say “what time” they say “5:30” I say “well, it’s 5:45” They say “WHAT!?” and rush to get ready. I do the same thing with the people next door, same reaction. It’s so funny to me, who compulsively likes to know what time it is. The same thing happened on Sunday morning with church. When I was about done getting ready to be there on time at 9, people were still sitting out washing their clothes and telling me they had “some minutes left” before church started. NOT! I went at 9:05 and only 1 other person was there, so I came back until 9:30 and went again when my roommates went, and then there were a few more people there. The last of the people didn’t show up until around 10:30/11 though. :-D
Friday afternoon someone caught a huge mudfish in the river, so pieces were given out to people for dinner. Somehow my house got the face. Not the head. The face. Guess how much meat is on the face of a mudfish? Not much. So after trekking to the storeroom in the dark to get oil to deep-fry the fish, people finally actually looked at what we had and realized there was not much meat to be cut off the fish. The sufuria it was in kept moving from apartment to apartment as different people looked at it and poked it with a knife, the whole time I’m trying out my new phrase: “sitaki kula uso wa samaki”- “I don’t want to eat the face of a fish” and people are laughing at me. Eventually we decided there wasn’t enough meat on the face to cook, and I cooked some scrambled eggs to go with the ugali they’d already made, and someone else made soup with the fish. I tasted a bite of the meat they managed to find somewhere, and it was surprisingly good and surprisingly didn’t taste anything like fish. Hence why it was surprisingly good.
Saturday was Garissa day! So I was told the trailer would load up at 6 and leave at 6:30, so I planned to be up around 5:30 so I could get my mattress out of there since I’m sleeping in the trailer, of course. The night before they tested out the tractor pulling the trailer and left it right outside my door, which was very nice of them to bring my bedroom so close to me! :-P A half hour after I woke up, I heard my roommates finally waking up and knocked on the door so they could let me in so I could shower and eat breakfast. Unfortunately, the bowl I tried to eat cereal out of had a hole in it so I poured milk all over the table. Cleaning it up cut into my getting ready time so I just brought the box of corn flakes on the trailer with me, to the endless amusement of the Kenyans. So surprisingly close to the target time, we pulled out in the trailer and stopped at a few of the local villages to pick up people who also wanted to go into town. We ended up with about 35 people and 2 goats on the trailer going into town. The path was the same bumpy trail-through-the-bush we drove in on, so we had to repeatedly duck or crouch down to avoid getting smacked in the face and arms and back by branches or thorns or thorny branches. They’re called “mathenge” though I’m not sure if “mathenge” is the word for “thorn” or it’s a specific type of thorn…I’ve heard a couple things that led me to opposite conclusions, so I dont know. but just about EVERY tree or bush-like thing seems to have more thorns than a cactus here. Anyway. Of course the mathenge could be avoided by sitting down in the middle instead of standing and leaning against the railing but where is the fun in that? Of course I stood against the railing and ducked whenever the thorns were coming. Before I mastered the art of “compulsory worship” as they sometimes call it, I got a nice scratch across my forehead and a good tear in the back of my shirt. Battle scars, woohoo! The people in the middle-front never had to duck, and they were the ones who would yell “sleep!” and “wake up!” when we needed to get down and when it was safe to stand up….most of the time.
About 10 minutes into the ride something made a noise and something fell off the wheel. We stopped the tractor and someone ran back to get whatever it was, then everyone piled out of the trailer so they could lift it up and re-attach the something to the wheel. Then we all piled back in and continued. When we got to the giant dried-up riverbed, the sand was pretty soft and deep, like a beach, and the tractor got stuck. Not to worry, this happens literally every time, so everyone got out and pushed it across the riverbed, then piled back in. I got some pretty good pictures/video of the process that may eventually make it to the internet.
So that was an adventure! We got into Garissa and people went their separate ways running errands, I got some apple juice at the grocery store, which I had been craaaaaving for some reason, and we had COLD, FRESH passion fruit juice when we stopped for breakfast…it was a little piece of heaven. It’s not often you eat cold or fresh things in Sombo, and I love passion fruit juice!
It’s still really amusing to me to see the funny looks I get from eeeeeeveryone on the street. In Nairobi, it was just the kids who openly gawked or said anything, but in these more remote places, even the adults and especially the high-on-something people often stop in their tracks or try yelling to me in Somali, which I know a total of 3 words in.
So we did our stuff, and everyone got back to the trailer around 4, not bad for planning to leave around 3:30. We got back after only one breakdown in the riverbed, around 6:00, which is apparently the earliest they’ve arrived back in over a year. Last time it was 1am because the tractor broke in the middle of nowhere and they had to find a way to fix it in the bush. Some people went to sleep and woke up to the sound of hyenas before they fixed it. Ooooooooh bush life! It’s an adventure every day!
Soooooo I was so dirty from sitting on the ground on the ride back (I’d had enough thorn adventures for the day) and getting shrapnel from all the branches we drove by and stripped the leaves/thorns/bark off of, that I took a hot-wateer-thanks-to-the-sun bath and then I swept out my bedroom because it was dirty and goats don’t care where they are when they poop, they just do.
Sunday morning it RAINED for like 5 minutes, and lightly, but still, it RAINED, during church. That was exciting. :-P Also we made chapatti with dinner! And I had my first ever unsuccessful attempts and first ever successful attempt at siphoning…there’s small-ish tanks of water outside every couple of rooms, and our inside tank was empty. I feel like siphoning is a good life skill to have. :-P So it was a good day.
Also, there was a youth meeting (youth being…unmarried people?) and we all went around to introduce ourselves and “say something” and I had nothing to say, so I said “peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” etc and that was quite amusing to everyone. Everything I do or say is hysterical to them, so I just keep doing things that even I think are ridiculous because it’s so funny that they think I’m so funny.
Today a 35-ish year old guy came into the clinic because he had a stick stuck in his leg. It had gotten lodged in there not long ago, maybe yesterday? But it had moved since he’d been walking on it. So Margaret numbed the area and tried digging it out with a needle but it was too deep and we couldn’t figure out exactly where it had gone to, so we told him to come back in a few days…hopefully his body will do some of the work for us first.
Today I was going to make myself Italian-style green beans for lunch…and probably nothing else, since that’s about as complicated as I feel like getting out here, and I managed to find a grater to shred my garlic, and I’d bought olive oil in Nairobi, and as soon as I get the oil heating up, the stove ran out of gas. So there’s a sufuria full of oil and garlic, and a can of whole green beans, just sitting there, uncooked and uneaten, though I can just TASTE them the way my mom makes them….but theres nothing I can do about it right now. Hopefully someone else will lend us their stove to cook dinner. We usually do that in groups anyways so I’m not worried. But I was contemplating those beans all morning and really looking forward to them. :-P