up country part 2

I have the whole thing written, but I realize this is post number 3 for today, so I will leave that for later.

I stumbled out of the car, wondering what this house had in store for me the next couple of days. Lights hung in the rooms, but no electricity reached the house yet. There was running water from somewhere. The ceiling wasn’t complete, so noise carried through the whole house. There was a roof, just no ceiling. The front room had an ancient set of furniture that complained every time someone sat down. Three chairs surrounded the dining room table. The kitchen had a sink and a few counters, but no real stove. There were little stoves that they brought in, that they put charcoal in the base, and it cooks the food. Kind of like a Dutch oven type of idea.

A staple of Kenyan life seems to be tea, so the first order of business was to get the tea going. Which they cook over a fire outside. Goooooooood stuff. While we enjoyed our tea, we also enjoyed the incredible view of Lake Victoria. I stopped to listen to the noise of the village. Birds singing, various farm animals making their noises. Despite the noise, it is incredibly peaceful. As I breathed in the fresh clean air, I felt time slowing down; I could feel the African way of life.

We had Kenyan food the whole weekend. Have you ever noticed there are no Kenyan restaurants around the world? I experienced some of the reasoning behind that.
Reason # 1: Ugali. It is prepared a few different ways, but it is similar to grits. One way I have had it has the same consistency as glue. The other uses much less water; it can be rolled up into balls, etc. still tastes like glue.
Reason # 2: Sikumawiki. Cabbage-ish Kale stuff, cooked, and salty. I imagine it is similar to eating seaweed. If my life depended on it, I could probably choke it down.
Reason # 3: spices? What are those? Kenyans don’t use spices.
You probably get the picture. There is more, but that probably is sufficient. Betty described a meal to us that they make with fish, and it sounded absolutely disgusting. I am so glad we didn’t have a chance to get fish for that meal before we left.


We walked down to the lake before it got too dark. We had already seen a few kids earlier in the evening, and this time we saw more people. Their eyes lit up when I used the Swahili greeting “habari” as we walked by. Most of these people had never seen a white person. Now not only did they see two whites, one of them spoke in a language the villagers understood.

When we were at the lake itself, there were about 20 villagers hanging out down there. Betty laughed at something they said in Swahili, which she translated later for us. The lines went down like this:
“who brought the Mzungus?”
“I don’t know. Who is having Mzungu babies that we don’t know about?”
We are obviously a sight wherever we go, especially to the children who do not realize it isn’t polite to stare.

We headed back to the house and had dinner around 8:30, then Angie and I were ready to head to bed. It had been a long day, and we had another long one tomorrow. There is a hill behind the house that I was tempted to climb to watch the sunrise over Lake Victoria. Funny how that didn’t happen… Best laid plans, right? It would have been gorgeous, but the sleep was really nice too.

more to come...