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***edit: this post was originally written a couple months ago.  Been having serious internet struggles!***

Hi everyone.  We’ve had some electrical/internet issues here in Shikokho, so this post is from about two weeks ago.  More coming soon!

            While my situation here in Kenya could definitely be worse, there are certain modern luxuries that I do miss.  For example, washing machines.  Doing laundry here takes a bit of planning ahead.  First, you must soak your clothes in a basin overnight to loosen up the dirt.  It is unwise to leave your clothes soaking for more than one night—I have found—because it leaves the fabric smelling foul.  It also attracts little flies that, for some reason, like to rest in the standing water.  I can only hope they are not laying eggs.  For these reasons, you must be sure that you will have the time and/or inclination to wash your clothes the next day, no matter how lazy you may be (but probably are) feeling.  The actual process of washing the clothes is not overly difficult or complicated; it just requires a lot of bending over and several trips to the sink (thank goodness this house has running water—however unreliable it may be).  After letting the laundry soak in a water/detergent mixture for 15 minutes or so, you are ready to start scrubbing.  At first I used a brush to scrub the fabric, but as the bristles pull too roughly at the threads I switched to simply rubbing the cloth hard against itself.  I’ve developed a pretty intense callous on the top knuckle of my right forefinger from the rubbing.  When the scrubbing is done, you must refill your basin three separate times to rinse the detergent out.  Then, all that’s left to do is to hang everything out on the line!  The great thing about laundry here is that I have no need to iron—the air is so dry and the sun so strong that my shirts and skirts dry too quickly to leave wrinkles.

            Last weekend was full of mundane tasks like this.  Since I have been here for over a month now, I decided that it was time to commit to my new home.  On Saturday morning I felt the strong urge to do something about my walls, which were covered in dirt (seriously, who got mud on their hands and then said, “Hmm, I think this wall is probably best place for me to wipe this off”??).  After hours of scrubbing the walls inch by inch—during which I listened to two separate movie commentaries from the Ocean’s 11 DVD—I was exhausted and only halfway done.  Sunday morning, due to the aforementioned incentives, I was forced to do my laundry.  This proved much more pleasant than usual, however, as Maxwell joined me out in the yard to wash the one shirt and one pair of shorts that he wears to school every day.  He is generally a quiet kid, so I was blown away when he began talking to me in terrific english (he made some mistakes, but never to the point where I could not understand his meaning).  He told me all about his old school and even showed me some pictures from a school field trip to nearby Kisumu—a city about one hour away on the shore of Lake Victoria.  It is also the area the Obama family comes from.  And here I’ve been thinking that he couldn’t understand me!  I showed him some pictures that I had brought from home and we chatted about other things like agriculture and the weather (both favorite conversation topics among Kenyans) while we did our washing.

Maxwell washing his school uniform

Maxwell and me doing our laundry

            The rest of Sunday was spent finishing the walls and mopping the floor, which proved to be a horrendous task.  There is no actual mop in the house—just an old sweater that gets used for the job.  I began with a cheap washcloth I bought in Kakamega, but as this was making for very slow progress I bit the bullet and switched to one of the nicer (but bigger) hand towels I had also gotten in town.  Unlike the women I’ve seen mopping here, I wanted to do more than simply push the dirt around on the floor, so it took many trips back and forth to the sink to empty and refill my water bucket. One swipe of the towel on the floor would immediately turn the water opaque with mud.  It was incredible.  I don’t even want to think about the last time that floor was cleaned.  Ick.

            Contrary to popular belief, I am actually able to bathe (almost) every day with clean, warm water.  The house has a little room with a sink and a shower (which is separate from the toilet stall), but the shower head does not work.  This is just as well, because the water is not heated anyway.  I think at one point the house had a water heater, but from what I understand it’s been out of commission for some time now.  I have a little basin that I fill with around 70% cold water from the sink and 30% hot water that I heat up on my gas stove.  Then, I use a plastic pitcher to pour the water over myself.  It is actually not unpleasant and I feel rather good about how dramatically my water consumption has dropped since I’ve been here—you would be amazed at how little water it actually takes to get clean.  There have been a few nights where I’ve had to skip my shower (or I’ll just skip shampooing my hair) because the water pump has the bad habit of breaking all the time, but, overall, I go to bed every night squeaky clean.

            Cooking has not been any source of huge annoyance so far.  I use a single-burner stovetop with an electric starter that is hooked up to a little gas tank that sits under the counter.  I’m not sure how long the tank will last, but I’m told two or three months [edit: as of publish date, the tank is still going strong].  At home, I use a frying pan to cook the majority of my meals anyway, so this hasn’t been much of an adjustment.  Sometimes I do wish I had an oven to make bread in, however.  I can also easily do without microwaves, but I am beginning to really miss refrigerators.  As it is, I have to cook pretty much every meal from scratch and if I mess up and make too much (which happens often), then—in an effort not to waste food—I just have to suck it up and stuff myself.  I’ve saved plain rice and naan bread in a Tupperware overnight and it’s been fine, but I’ve tried this with curry dishes and they develop a weird taste the next day (I’ve gotten super into Indian food since I’ve been here, but I’ll talk more about the actual foods I cook in a later post).

My cooking area--I have since acquired a small set of plastic shelves for my dishes

Gas burner where I do all my cooking

            For drinking water I have been mostly boiling (I broke my magical SteriPen several weeks ago by dropping it onto the concrete floor.  The sucker bruised my foot pretty badly on the way down so I was doubly irritated).  The advice I found online about sterilizing drinking water varies from “boil for one minute” to “boil to 20 minutes,” but I usually let it go for about 10 seconds.  Once the boiling point is reached, isn’t everything already dead anyway?  Maybe this logic is flawed, but as I have yet to get sick, I’m sticking to it.  Boiling does have its drawbacks—mainly, I don’t like wasting so much gas.  The other issue is logistical—you can’t wait until you’re thirsty to boil, unless you want to drink hot water (yuck).  And then, if you’re me, yet another (serious) issue is remembering that you turned the stove on.  Before this weekend I had only let it go really long once—I put a pot on, promptly forgot, then laid down and fell asleep for an hour.  The water had not all boiled out before I turned it off, however.  This Saturday was a different story.  I put some water on in the morning while I was getting ready to go teach my morning lesson.  I was running late so I put the flame on extra high to speed up the process. 

           Who can guess what happens next??  In my hurried state I, naturally, forgot all about the water and rushed to school.  When I came back a little over an hour later I still hadn’t remembered, and the faint burning smell I noticed when I walked into the house did nothing to arouse my suspicions (to be fair, I had just spent a very frustrating sixty minutes attempting to keep 100 teenagers in check and was—understandably, I think—distracted).  After an hour reading outside, I got up to refill my water bottle and the realization of what I had done hit me.  I dashed inside and turned the gas off.  At first I was confused at the small mound of ashes piled on the lid of the pot, but I eventually remembered that I had left a cloth napkin sitting there when I left…guess that explains the smell.  When everything had cooled off I opened the lid and saw that the flame had melted a hole clear through the metal pot and I had to do some jiggling to detach the twisted metal from the stove.  Oops. 

Love,

Emily