The Quest for Food

Well, we survived our first night of cooking for ourselves – if only barely.

The old team and our supervisors left us entirely to our own resources the first Sunday night in Garissa, and it was…an adventure.

There had been no chance to go to town, so we only had what we had bought in the Nakumatt in Nairobi and brought with us (one pan, some plastic cups, a butcher knife, no silver ware, ramen noodles, and two cans of tuna that had somehow found their way to our house after the Amazing Race instead of being eaten for lunch). We also had no light in the kitchen because there was no bulb in the socket.

We told the boys that we would feed them dinner, on the condition that they put the bulb in. (Warren is ridiculously tall and the only one who could reach.)

It turns out that neither end of the deal was as easily done as said.

We have a two burner gas stove, but one of the legs is a little melted, so it sits crooked on the counter top. Esther was boiling ramen noodles in our skillet to make kind of a tuna noodle casserole, and she had just put down the butcher knife that she was using to stir it all, when the entire skillet tipped over and spilled boiling water all over her hand…and the kitchen.

While me and Laura swept all the noodles out the kitchen door and into the garden (there was one of those little, grass hand brooms in the house when we got here but no dustpan) and then tried to wipe down the floor, Ashley took care of Esther’s hand, and Warren took his first shot at putting in the light bulb.

Turns out there was the base of an old light bulb stuck in the socket, and the entire socket ended up breaking. No problem. Right? We had an extra socket coming out of the wall in the bedroom that was perfectly good and should have been easy enough to remove.

…Except for the fact that there are seven different light switches in the bedroom and only one working bulb. They all got turned off, except for the one leading to that socket (Jason showed us the next day where the circuit box is…)

After electrocuting his thumb, Warren got the socket off and proceeded to try and wire it into the kitchen – by flashlight, by now, because is was getting to be dusk, and the kitchen gets darker far faster than the rest of the house.

Unfortunately, the remaining wire was of less than stellar quality, and, every time it finally looked like the socket was in, the twisted wires would break, and the entire process had to be restarted – all while Esther was trying to remake dinner with a new batch of noodles.

The only break in the pattern was when Warren’s knife slipped and he sliced open the thumb that hadn’t been electrocuted.

Shortly after we got his second thumb patched up, the power went out, so, after a few more minutes by flashlight, we called it quits and settled for eating dinner, which was an adventure in itself.

Esther had scooped the casserole into plastic cups, (The idea was to pour it out onto your slice of bread and kind of slurp it from there – very sophisticated, we know) but, there’s this thing with ramen noodles when you make then into a casserole. They tend to kind of stick together.

So, every time you dumped some out, you ended up with a cup shaped mass of wiggly dinner staring up at you from a piece of sliced white bread.

Maybe we were just tired, and, maybe, after so many “incidents” in the span of less than an hour, we would have found anything amusing, but the jello like properties of the casserole provided for quite the meal time entertainment.