on the fritz

I forgot the word for goat. And I completely missed an entire small essay. Other than that the Swahili exam went well, all two and a half hours of it. Also I feel a little bit better about missing the essay because a whole bunch of other students didn't see it either. My hope is that the Swahili teachers will take that into consideration and adjust accordingly. My vote goes for making that question into extra credit.

After the exam, Adam and I went to the national annual Agricultural Fair. It was pretty much your typical country fair -- prizes for the biggest pig and tents with information about how to grow tea and fight pests organically. The highlight of the Fair was mama signed me up to ride a camel. Camels are weird creatures. I mean really. That camel made sounds like it had swallowed a model T engine on the fritz and an unattended electric kettle too. It was pretty concerning. I sampled camel milk too, because when else am I going to get the opportunity?

Our Going Away luncheon as on Saturday. We all pitched in with the cooking. I cut up close to a zillion cucumber, zucchini, and eggplants for a massive pot of vegetable stew. During the luncheon, I got to carry around baby Kamau. He fell asleep on my shoulder. I am actually going to keep him.

Power outages ("blackouts" is the local term) are frequent in Kenya. Ten minutes after Las Dos Caras de Ana ended, the power blew. Africa isn't called the dark continent for nothing! For probably the only time in my life, we celebrated my birthday in the dark. Mama baked a cake uing half a box of old brownie mix and haphazardly estimated quantities of various other ingredients. The oven, it turns out, is broken, so the cake was baked dutch oven style -- hot coals piled on the lid of the pan set over more hot coals. It worked out and the cake was yummy. Mama even managed to round up twenty birthday candles, which eased the blackout for the three minutes they were lit. It was a lot of fun and super sweet of them.

It took me two hours to pack everything the next morning. I'm stil baffled at how I fit it all. We had birthday cake for breakfast. I walked all the way to a cyber before remembering the power was still out. I learned how to carry a baby on my back Kikuyu style with Grace and her mama while waiting for mama wangu to finish getting ready to go out to lunch. African baby-carrying is so much more awesome than newfangled Amerian backpacks and frontpacks. You can actually feel the kid and can tell what's up with her.

My family and Collin and Adam's family went out for lunch for the last time (riding in the back of a pickup truck -- it was raining again, of course), where we were serve approximately three quarters of a goat and several chickens. Mama Florence kept insisting the chicken was actually flamingo, but I was having none of her nonsense. Florence's granddaughter Flora, who is quite possibly the most obnoxious three-year-old on the planet (and this coming from someone who adores three-year-olds), entertained herself by beating on Collin and me. I practiced my Swahili with her since we're both at the beginning stages of language acquisition, and I'm all sorts of pleased to report that I'm improving.

We were dropped a Methodis Guest NHouse late in the afternoon. For the first time in literally a month I had a simultaneously hot and running shower. Ah, luxury. We went out for steller Ethiopian food for dinner and seemed to have been charged a wazungu tax, but whatever I was sooo good.

We took a bus to Mombasa that was so massive that it is probably soley responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. It was supposed to be about an 8 hour trip, but the bus broke down about two hours from Mombasa and sundown. We climbed up on top of the bus to avoid lions (don't worry, we weren't actually in lion territory) and watched the sunset. It was beautiful, if a bit inconvenient.

In true Maisha fashion, I got terribly sick on my birthday (well, the following morning). I got a bug from who know what, and wasn't keeping down even water for about 36 hours there. We were on and off buses all day, seeing Fort Jesus and buying kikoi in the marketplace at Mombasa, both of which woul have been enjoyable had I been feeling better. I actually fell asleep on the concrete at Fort Jesus because there was a sign on the grass that said Do Not Walk on the Grass. When it became apparent that over-the-counter meds were not fixing me, I was instructed to break out the cipro, which I obligingly took along with water and rehydration salts. I'm feeling much better now, but there were a couple of days there that were pretty unhappy. When I finally resurfaced and was able to appreciate where we were, I discovered we'd driven to paradise. You know those ads for exotic vacations that somehow have pristinely deserted tropical beaches? That was this place. Dunno what it's called, but we were at a resort about an hour north of Mombasa. It was stunningly beautiful. And best, there was no one around because it's not tourist season. I even woke up early on Thursday morning to watch the sunrise over the Indian Ocean -- which you can walk out into for about a mile before it gets deep, by the way, at the place we were staying. Zillions of shells all over the beach, too. Oh, and the beach was actually pretty much connected to our hotel. Incredible.

I seem to be uncharacteristically accident prone in East Africa. I managed to ram my left hand into a moving ceiling fan. Banged my fingers up a bit, but no permanent damage.

Before leaving for Zanzibar, our bus carried us to the Gede ruins outside of Mombasa. We got to walk all over this super neat old stone village. The Swahili people were clever several hundred years ago! They'd worked out how to rig a central cooling system and some rudimentary plumbing. There was a Tarzan-style treehouse way up in the top of a baobab tree there, so we could look out onto the entire wreckage of what was once Gede. We also got to sample baobab fruit, which is in the running for weirdest fruit in existence. It's super dry and crumbly on the inside -- you could never make baobab fruit juice. It's about the same texture as freeze-dried ice cream.

We're now in Zanzibar. We took a little puddle-jumper to get here. Tomorrow we'll start our three-day homestay on Pemba island, and after that it's back to Zanzibar for about a week. My internet access is drawing to a close -- probably only another few entries before we start safari.