After what seems like countless mornings of waking up at 6 o clock to the sound of church bells, it was to my surprise that today Natalie was the one waking us up.
“ They’re my friends I HAVE to wake them up!”. Despite the rest of the groups hopes of less mouths to feed, thanks to Natalie, our sleepy room got to enjoy some delicious crepes (a nice change from toast and hard boiled eggs). With full bellies and smiles on our faces, we threw on our seven day old work clothes, yuck, and took the daladala’s off to work. The cloudy skies tried they’re hardest to rain but the drought allowed only a light sprinkle fall down. We slipped into our usual work routine filling, shoveling, mixing and brick laying. Lunch rolled around and again triple decker PB&J and hard boiled eggs, on the brighter side we had apple juice and bananas. Its crazy the simple things that make you happy when you don’t have full availability. Mrs. Richardson, what a funny gal, told us that we’d have to work two hours later (even though we had an hour early start that day). When our faces dropped and she was satisfied she announced that she was pulling our legs and we were off work right then and there. We quickly headed home to get cleaned up for our trip into town, but the house was still out of water. The race was on. Kids ran with buckets to outside taps to try and catch the last drops. Then as you can guess we all, (Kenya, Kaish, Natalie and I) shared the bucket of water to wash our hair and bodies. Town was an adventure to say the least. When we got off the daladala we were surrounded by mobile venders, one guy was extremely persistent and followed us all the way to the other end of town. Towards the end however, our ears soon filled with the sound of elaborate gospel praise. With open arms we were welcomed to join an outside church service, which we did. We didn’t have to understand or even agree with the words to be moved by this emotional and spiritual experience. On our way back we encountered another type of musical experience, one our ears were more accustomed too. We waved down a daladala for our travel back to base camp, and to our surprise this one was what we called “pimped out”. The drivers excitedly blasted American Top 40 music, as were driving down the streets with the bass thumping and beats blaring. The looks we got were mixed, some confused at the sight of a group of white kids singing and dancing in a daladala, while others were fascinated and joined in with our fun. When we arrived home we had ten minutes to scarf down suppber before departing for the movies. To our amazement the theater was higher class than what we were expecting. We had a nice taste of home with buttery popcorn and a cold pop that was accompanied by a ton of laughs and a few tears. After the movie we headed home, tired from another full but eventful day. Even though lots had happened that day we knew what we were going to be dreaming about, the amazing events that were about to take place during the safari.
- Veronika Deleff
No comments:
Post a Comment