Umoja

So, what do we do of a day? It can’t all be sitting on the swing chair of an afternoon sipping G&Ts whilst the sun sets can it?

This is what the Scannell half of the Scannell/Brown household gets up to on your average weekday. Having written it now, it seems a bit un-exciting (no lion wrestling or anything) but please read on if you’ve a spare 10 minutes!

Most mornings, we get up before 7 and set about getting breakfast from component form into something more palatable. As ever, I subsist exclusively on coffee ‘til the afternoon. Hannah alternates between cereals, but Tommy…..

Having passed through a phase where he ate sparsely in the morning, Tommy has really upped the ante. He starts breakfast with a bowl of Weetabix (either one and a half or two) and a yoghurt drink. He then moves on to a bowl of Museli topped with Yoghurt. He follows this with a couple of slices of bread and Marmite (yay, found some at last in Nairobi!). Sometimes he might ask for a banana too. He must get it from his mother….

By 7.30, its time for me to leave for my Swahili lessons, however, I rarely leave on time. Usually Hannah, Tommy and I all get out the gate at the same time and jump on BodaBoda. A BodaBoda is a bicycle taxi. It is just a regular, single gear 50’s style (heavy) bicycle with a padded seat on the rear pannier. Nearly every male in Kisumu under the age of 40 seems to be employed as a BodaBoda driver. They are EVERYWHERE. Here’s the Wikipedia entry about them. There is very little traffic on the road in Kisumu and we always take back routes. Anywhere else and I’d think it insane to use this form of transport!

I finish my lesson just after 8 and set off for the walk in to town. My classes are in a tin shack by the lake on the road out to Dunga. The walk back to town is about 30 minutes. There are many different birds to see on the way. I always see a pair of Bee Eaters, Hammerkop, Martins (various), Weavers (lots of types), Glossy Ibis, Sacred Ibis, as well as occasional sightings of Black Shouldered Kite, an African Fish Eagle, Grey Hooded Kingfisher and once what I think was a Black-capped Night Heron. Thanks to Hannah’s aunt and uncle (Marion and Dave) I am now the lucky owner of a pair of binoculars. I used them for the first time last night and have finally started to identify the common visitors to our garden.

By about 8.30, I get into town. I usually go the post box. Most times there’s ‘nowt, except Thursdays when last week’s Guardian Weekly arrives. I then go to Kenshop, a good cybercafe in town, to browse the web and check email. Having said that, all I usually do is spend two hours reading Metafilter and either laughing out loud or shouting at the screen.

I head back to school for 12pm and collect Tommy. Invariably he is exhausted. We used to walk home together with me carrying him on my shoulders, but nowadays, we are usually offered a lift by his friend’s mum. I miss the walk, because it was basically half an hour’s solid talking by Tommy. Often, this chatter covered whatever was on his mind plus what he’d done at school that day. There seems to be a lot on his mind now that he realises he has one. A fair amount of his musing is also very amusing. He’s a very funny little boy. He’s in to making nonsense statements at the moment (basic stuff like pointing at one thing and saying its another) and this constant stream of talk used to make the walk home fly by. He can also identify quite a few birds now, especially the common ones, or ones he sees in the garden most days. He particularly likes egrets, of which we have about 20 - 30 that roost in a tree in our garden.

He rests from about 1pm until 3pm when Carolyn arrives to look after him for the afternoon. This gives me a fair bit of time to catch up with Swahili vocab, read the paper, or just do nothing. Usually, a friend of Tommy’s called Alfred will come over to play till it dusk falls around 6pm. I usually start to make dinner around then. I feel all Blue Peterish when it comes to cooking now. As a child watching the show, I always thought it must be great to have all the ingredients prepared and waiting in bowls for you to add as required. Lillian is not used to western cooking yet, but she preps everything for us. If we fancy more traditional African fare, like ugali and stew, we don’t really need to do anything.

Tommy has his bath time around 7.30 and is in bed having a story by 8pm. As ever, he is really easy to put to bed. Lights are usually out by 8.30 at the latest. By this time, I’m pretty knackered, but will usually sit up for a bit watching (crap US imported) TV until the news is on in English at 9.00pm.

We put the house and ourselves to bed at about 10pm and thus start the daily cycle all over again…

Sorry there’s not much about what Hannah does. She is nearly always beavering away in her office and pops out for lunch during the day. She tends to resurface at about 5pm when she finishes what she’s doing. On Wednesdays, she’s out in the field anthopologising, although this is set to increase to at least half the week in the not to distant future.

I’ll leave it there for now with a promise that the next post will be mostly photos! I PROMISE!