Day Four
Nothing much happened on day four other than me being forced into more pro bono interpretation labor for Parent 2, so I guess I’ll describe what our daily routine’s been like for the last week in detail instead.
So every morning we’ve been waking up at 6-6:30AM promptly to get ready for breakfast served in the main building of the hotel at 7.00AM. Although the usual pattern is that nobody really gets there promptly at 7.00AM, breakfast seems to be served between the hours of 7.00AM to 8.30AM which is when most of us show up downstairs for breakfast. Breakfast is usually scrambled eggs, untoasted bread with the choice of boiled eggs and/or sausages as garnish, which I’ve never been adventurous enough to try.
After breakfast we head back to our hotel rooms usually to get ready to go to wherever we’re going for the day; popular destinations for the last few days have been the church Parent 2’s NGO has been setting up and the two primary schools that we’ve been visiting to give away supplies and what not. The getting ready part is usually done in a cinch; the hard part is getting to the destination. Our preferred method of transportation during our stay in Bondo so far was either the back of a Toyota pickup wagon, or packing ourselves like sardines in a RAV4. I’ve actually had to cram in the front seat of the RAV4 a few times with Parent 1, so my preferred transportation method between the two is the pickup wagon but even that requires 8-9 people to cram in the back of the wagon, sitting on two wooden benches facing each other.
Lunch for the past few days have been served at a Kenyan residence, inside a living room furnished with multiple sofas with many people eating from a several dishes that were laid out in the middle of the table in buffet style. (I think I’ve already touched on this on Day Three, so I’ll skip the rest about lunch)
After the day’s scheduled events were done and taken care of, we head back to the hotel in the same two methods of transportation mentioned above, and usually by the time we get back to the hotel it’s usually somewhere around 18.30 or 19.00, whereas dinner is served at 19.00. Dinner for the most part has always included rice, some sort of steamed/sliced+fried potato dish, some vegetable which looks like grass but tastes like Korean Nameul , some chicken/pork dish and some fish. I can’t say that I have been entirely satisfied with the dinner that they’ve been providing here, but then again I can’t say that I’ve been disappointed either; the food itself is clean, it’s edible and it’s somewhat westernized—whether the food served here is authentic Kenyan food or not is up for grabs, but at least they seem to be serving Ugali with every meal.
Usually after dinner we head back to our annex building (the hotel is divided into the main building where the restaurants and some of the rooms are, and the annex, which is right across the street from the main building which shelters a few conference rooms and the rooms that we’re staying in) to wash up and get ready for sleep. Usually before going to sleep Parent 2’s NGO group usually has some sort of a reflection meeting to reflect on what happened during the day, what went well, what could have been done better, etc., but I usually tend to stay away from it and just chill in my room or take a shower. One particular thing about Kenyan hotel rooms, is that the beds all come with a mosquito net-cage thingy to fend from mosquitoes (the primary source of malaria in the country), so usually before going to sleep, we untie the mosquito net-cage which is hung and tied from the ceiling, and unfold it so to cover the entire surface area of the bed; usually when the entire net is spread out, the bed looks like a canopy bed with someone trapped inside.
So that’s the particulars of our days here in Bondo in a wrap.